by Helen Thomas
So the rider understood just how critical the Turnbull was for both Lidari and Moody Racing, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he urged the stallion out of the barriers and took up a prominent position as the field moved towards the first turn. In OTI Racing’s vibrant silks of navy and yellow stripes, the pair was easy to spot – especially with Lidari sporting a prominent white nose roll and the jockey’s distinctive riding style. It was clear to all that they were determined to stay near the front of the field.
Intriguingly, up there with them was another bay wearing identical colours and a nose roll. This was Liadri’s younger stablemate, Brambles, a Queensland Derby winner also vying for spring glory for the same owners. The only thing that set them apart as they settled third and fourth in the race was the colour of their jockeys’ caps: Luke Nolen on Brambles wore blue, while Arnold on Lidari wore white.
Like Lidari, Brambles was keen to move forward, and not get too far back in the large field and run the risk of having to navigate tired horses in the run home. And as they swung into the home stretch, it seemed as if the stablemates would fight out the race between them. With Lidari and Arnold storming along the outside of the valiant leader, Entirely Platinum, and with Brambles and Nolen going with them on the inside, nearer the running rail, they gradually overhauled the pace-setter and prepared to slug out the final 200 metres.
Brambles seemed to have Lidari’s measure, throwing himself ahead of his older rival. What they couldn’t see, of course, was what was happening behind them, and they did not sense Lucia Valentina – a classy, strong mare from Newcastle – striding down the centre of the track, reeling them in with every bound. And then it was too late: she was rushing past them. Peter Moody’s pair rallied, and Arnold and Lidari pulled ahead of Brambles as they swept past the post. It was an exhilarating finish, franking the potential that OTI had seen in the galloper, as well as Moody’s work acclimatising the ‘international’.
Form analysts have marked this race as Lidari’s best performance on the Australian turf, and by a significant margin. The Ratings Bureau scored it at 105.3, up on his previous start (102.1) and on his previous best of 102.5. In layman’s terms, the horse had improved by 2.1 lengths.
Timeform Australia also ranked Lidari’s run in the Turnbull as his peak performance. But chief analyst Gary Crispe believes it was in keeping with the progress the stallion had made since joining Moody’s yard. ‘Lidari had continued to progress his Timeform rating in three campaigns to date,’ Crispe writes, ‘and as is usually the case with Northern Hemisphere–bred gallopers, they normally take a few campaigns to acclimatise and reach their potential. So Moody had every reason to expect his fourth campaign could be his best to date, and in terms of progressing his ratings profile, it was highly likely that Lidari would again peak this preparation, provided of course the tracks remained firm. In summary, the ratings profile exhibited by Lidari was consistent with a Northern-bred horse making steady progression through each of his first four campaigns and peaking marginally in the 2014 Turnbull Stakes, where arguably he was very well placed under that weight scale, as well as with an upward spiral in his ratings at that time.’
OTI’s Terry Henderson vividly recalls Lidari’s progression through the spring of 2014, including his sixth placing in the Caulfield Cup. ‘I can remember the conversations on Turnbull Stakes day, [and then] on Derby Day,’ he says. ‘Peter said, “Look, none of us really know whether he’s going to go two miles.” And he didn’t [know].’
According to Henderson, Moody asked: ‘Do you want to throw the dice?’
They did. By now, Lidari’s group of owners had expanded to include some of the biggest names in Australian ownership circles: Neil Werrett, one of Black Caviar’s lucky band of connections, and Queensland’s Glenlogan Park. None of them could have imagined, though, where Lidari’s good run in the Turnbull Stakes would lead, long-term.
He had done well enough to line up in the Melbourne Cup in November 2014, although he ‘didn’t race all that well’, as Henderson recalls. Officially, Lidari finished 19th in that year’s Cup field of 21. He was nowhere near the slipstream of Protectionist and Red Cadeaux, first and second past the post. It turned out the two-mile distance was beyond another OTI horse.
Three months later, in January 2015, the disappointment of the Melbourne Cup result must have seemed insignificant. Stewards advised the trainer that his enigmatic former French charge had tested positive to a higher level of cobalt in his system than was allowed under the rules of Australian racing. That was all it took for Peter Moody’s world to tip irrevocably.
It was a moment no one involved will forget. ‘Pete was in shock. We were all in shock,’ Terry Henderson says. ‘We were very surprised, and this was all fresh. Pete was extremely worried, because he had absolutely no idea where this came from. And I said, “Mate, just go through the whole process with this, because if you’re confident you’ve not been involved in anything untoward … well, you’ve just got to go through the process.” I’ve never known him to be as worried as he was.
‘When you run a stable that big, you’ve always got processes in place, and you’re always hoping those processes work, because you can’t be everywhere all the time. Now, there have been numerous occasions with many, many stables where the processes have slipped up – either in feeding practices, or in treatment processes – and the trainer bears the brunt of it, and this is the way it should be. And often, you know, not only are the stewards doing an investigation, the trainer himself is doing the investigation to try and find out what’s gone on.’
The owner has no idea what inquiries Lidari’s trainer made, at that early stage, to solve the mystery of the high cobalt reading. ‘Pete plays his cards close to his chest, as far as his business is concerned,’ Henderson says. ‘He’s not one that would go out and set up a mentor group to get through this. He paddles his own canoe … I do know that he’s not a guy that’s going to shirk any issue.
‘I think I can say, and I can’t say this about all trainers, but if there was someone I wanted to be in the trenches with, in Peter’s terminology, that’d be Moody. Because he is a fighter, and in fact that’s why he is where he is as a trainer. He’s had to come up … from the very basics of the industry.’
Well-intended as Henderson’s words were, the owner could not know how his advice about process and investigation would come to haunt the stable. How could he? The trainer had been drilled in stable process, after all, by one of Australia’s best.
4
HAVING SEEN SO much while working for T.J. Smith at Randwick – and mingling with Australian racing’s elite in the mounting yards – it seemed to Peter Moody that the time was right for him to travel to a new part of Australia.
With a mate from Neville Begg’s stable, he organised a stint working at Colin Hayes’ internationally regarded training complex at Lindsay Park, in South Australia.
Both Moody and his friend planned to be race horse trainers; so, they reasoned, why not spend a little time with another legend of the Australian turf? They had seen Hayes’ horses perform in Sydney, and had heard so much about the property that nurtured them. They lined up jobs and gave notice to their employers.
But if Sydney was a world away from Charleville, life in Angaston was further still, and the young would-be trainer did not handle the extra distance well. ‘It was probably the hardest thing we ever did,’ Moody reflects. ‘It was a totally different environment. It was interesting to have a look at how it worked and how they did things. But it was just totally different, and I was sort of a fish out of water, you know? I couldn’t stay there.’
Moody’s problem at Lindsay Park was simple: ‘I didn’t find it easy to learn,’ he says. ‘You were removed, the “new bloke” – you couldn’t become involved as much. It was nearly a class system. [That] might be the wrong thing to say, but that’s probably the way it felt.’
After just four months the young men returned to their old jobs in Sydney. Their t
ails were not between their legs, but they weren’t wagging quite as confidently as they had.
After another six months at Tulloch Lodge, his confidence restored, Moody decided to go home to Queensland. He missed playing footy with his mates, and he missed his family. ‘I’d missed growing up with my mates, chasing girls and drinking grog and smoking pot, because I’d been working my arse off,’ he recalls. ‘I think I’d probably only had one holiday in that period.’
As well as reconnecting with life away from the racetrack, the young man had a new plan. He would train horses in the bush. The only trouble was that he was still just 17. Moody might have made it to the ‘big smoke’ and worked for the great Tommy Smith, but he was still too young to start training in his own name. So Jan Moody, who at that time was working at the CES, applied for one in her name, which could serve until her son finally turned 18.
But the venture didn’t go well. ‘We had a couple of horses in the back yard,’ Moody says. ‘Mum and I must have done that for six months, and I realised, “Oh shit, as much as I love this and I love the lifestyle, and I love my friends, there’s no future in it.”’
Heading back to Sydney was the only way to try to build a future, or at least regain some of the ground he had lost by coming home. So with an introduction from a friend to a young trainer who was looking for a foreman, Moody returned once again to the Harbour City. He had no idea who this trainer was, where he was from or what his vision was. But it was worth a go.
Studio writers in Old Hollywood could not have conceived of two more disparate characters than Peter Moody and Bill Mitchell. While Moody, the younger of the pair, hailed from Queensland’s wild west, Mitchell was originally from the United Kingdom, and the lush Hunter Valley of New South Wales. He had arrived in Australia when he was 11, the perfect age to make the most of the property which his father – who had farmed a little of everything in Norfolk – had purchased from Australia’s internationally famous jockey George Moore in 1968. Billy Mitchell, who joined the sixth grade at Scone Primary School, revelled in his family’s new life.
Yarraman Park quickly became a stud of note, boasting prominent stallions and earning a reputation as a classy breeding nursery. Fine thoroughbreds were at the heart of the family business, and the young Mitchell decided he would become a trainer, gaining his licence at 26. By the time Moody contacted him looking for a job, Mitchell had moved his stables from Warwick Farm, in Sydney’s west, to Randwick in the vaunted east. To do so, he’d been forced to cut his team in half – from 30 to 14 staff – just so he could fit into the limited space at Sydney’s premier track.
It was a toehold compared to the large yards of master trainers Smith, Cummings and Begg. But it was Royal Randwick. ‘It was hard to get into stables at Randwick,’ Bill Mitchell remembers with a wry shrug. ‘[So] I had a good clean-out of the stable and bought some pretty nice horses at the time and came to Randwick.’
Striving to establish a position on the training ladder at Sydney racing’s ‘headquarters’ was one thing, but the trainer and his wife, Debbie, were also just a few weeks away from another big change when the young Queenslander wandered into their yard in December 1988 to discuss the position of foreman. ‘I was only there about a fortnight when their first, James, was born,’ Moody recalls. ‘I think [Mitchell] and his mates got on the piss for about a week. I’d been there about ten days and all of a sudden I was looking after the whole thing!’
Happily, this real-life version of The Odd Couple’s Oscar and Felix clicked from their initial meeting. ‘Bill had 14 boxes, and I don’t even know if we quite had enough horses to even fill them,’ Moody says. ‘But we just sort of grew. Bill was a very good trainer … He’d set a horse for a race, and he was very good at that, targeting horses and identifying horses with ability. But at the same time, he had a love of life and a young family, and enjoyed life and those sorts of things.’
Moody appreciated the opportunity he was given. ‘I probably learned how to train,’ he says. ‘I probably implemented a fair bit of what I’d learned, the T.J. systems.’ But it wasn’t always an easy relationship. ‘We’d blue about it at times: “Just because fucking T.J. did it, you don’t have to do that here.” And it probably helped him and it probably helped me too, when he rebuffed some of them, to show me that there were other ways to do things as well.’
As this professional duo went about their business, spending Saturdays together at provincial tracks like Kembla Grange and Newcastle, Mitchell began tapping into a new group of racing investors who had appeared on the scene: young stockbrokers and investment bankers keen to chase the adrenaline rush of the track, as well as the new tax breaks that came with being part of race horse ownership syndicates. The late 1980s were heady times, and the training team quickly learned to back their own judgement on the punt. ‘Bill was quite good then at getting the quid, you know?’ Moody says. ‘And we all got a quid when we backed a winner.’
Mitchell recognises that their relationship was special. ‘I’ve had a lot of foremen in nearly 30 years of training, 25 years anyway,’ he muses. ‘And you’ve clearly got to select them carefully. You have to get them doing things the way you want things done. Sometimes you get younger ones you can show; sometimes you might find an older one who has their own way of doing things and it clearly won’t work. You have to be able to mould them.’
Intriguingly, Mitchell is adamant that horsemanship isn’t all it’s about when it comes to running a strong stable. Attention to detail and programming a horse’s exercise regimen leading up to a race, or a series of races, is paramount.
‘You see people in the racing world that I wouldn’t think of as horsemen who can be very competent trainers,’ he says. ‘It’s [about] fitness levels and targeting races. You’ve got to keep [the horse] sound and healthy and get them to the races in good shape. It’s not rocket science. But some people do it a lot better than others.’
Conversely, the more successful a trainer becomes, the less time they have to spend with their horses. ‘You need good staff,’ Bill Mitchell says. ‘Once you get to a point where you’ve got good senior staff, they manage the younger staff. As a horse trainer, you spend so much time in the office. It’s scale: if you’ve got a lot of horses, you’ve got a lot of time managing people and probably not managing horses. So you’ve got to have people who know what they’re doing … You’ve got to have good people, because if you’re training a lot of horses, you just can’t be on top of it yourself.’
Mitchell’s new foreman from Queensland fitted this description. ‘He was very good with horses – he had a good understanding. He had been working with horses all his life. He loves horses. That’s all he wanted to do. So he lived it, and I got the benefit of that as well.’
*
Right from the start, Bill Mitchell recognised that Peter Moody wasn’t a career foreman. He was always going to be a horse trainer, with his own stable. But not, as it turned out, for a decade.
Between 1988 and 1998 these two ambitious young men – walking to the beat of different drums, yet sharing a love of thoroughbreds – would combine to produce a number of top gallopers, including Dignity Dancer, From the Planet, Livistona Lane and Stylish Century. The best of the lot would prove to be a dashing chestnut sprinter called General Nediym, almost their accidental hero.
By the early 1990s Moody had made an even better friend and partner: the young woman who would become his wife. Sarah Belcham had just come back from a stint in the United Kingdom and got a job riding trackwork at Randwick. One night she went along to the local pub, the Doncaster Hotel, with some friends. ‘We used to call it the Dirty Donny,’ she remembers, ‘and I think Pete was down there saying goodbye to one of his workmates and I was down there with some work colleagues, just having a beer after work, and we just got chatting.’ She laughs as she recalls their first encounter. ‘I think the blokes he was with came over to our table and Pete was sort of sitting at his table on his own, so I went over and introduced myself
and had a bit of a chat. He was a country boy, very shy, and we had a lot in common, because I’m a country girl from New Zealand … And, I don’t know, we just clicked. We just clicked.’
As much as Sarah wanted to be with Peter, she couldn’t see a future for them as a couple if they stayed in Sydney. She loved the city’s beaches but hated its ‘city-ness’.
‘So I said to Pete, “Well, you know, I really, really like you, and I think you really, really like me, but I can’t stay with you if you’re going to live in Sydney. I can’t. I can’t see a future here – I can’t live here.” Obviously, by this stage, we were realising that we were quite keen to stay together, so I basically gave him a year to work out another situation, like somewhere we could go and make a life for ourselves that wasn’t in a city.’
At this point, too, Sarah mapped out a financial plan for the couple. ‘I found out [that] year we were making our plans that we would have to downsize and live in a bedsit; he had a few bills, he had a little bit of debt that he had created while he went back home to train in Queensland when he was 18 … So we lived in a bedsit, the cheapest place we could find, which was close enough to the track at Randwick. And he was on the bigger wage, so I said, “Right, we put your wage away and we live on my wage,” and he copped that really well.’
Given this support, and having worked with Bill Mitchell for five years in Sydney, Moody decided to strike out again as a trainer in Queensland. He gave Mitchell three months’ notice, but at the last minute his boss had a better idea: why not expand the Sydney stable to Brisbane, so that the local lad could return home but not have to start from scratch?
