by Helen Thomas
Peter and Sarah had tried to take out a joint training licence, as a professional partnership, but the authorities knocked them back. They were 20 years ahead of their time. So Mitchell took out the licence in his name and the two men nutted out an agreement whereby they became partners in the Brisbane-based business. ‘So the financial incentive was there for me to make it work,’ Moody explains. ‘And we did that for five years. And it worked very successfully.’
Initially, this success was built on horses Bill Mitchell deemed not good enough to make it in Sydney’s more competitive fields. ‘He knew I was going to look after them,’ Moody says, ‘and we won a lot of races with lesser horses that weren’t quite good enough in Sydney. They’d be able to go to Brisbane and win. And we had good success, and that attracted a lot of local clients.’
One day, in the autumn of 1996, a new owner came to Moody’s door in Brisbane. He was looking for a trainer for a yearling his wife had bred, and had already knocked on the door of the much bigger Crown Lodge stable first. When no one answered, Ron Ashdown got back in his car and drove along the street.
‘It was a Sunday afternoon and [Ashdown] lived not too far away,’ Moody remembers. ‘It was just the middle of the day. I might have been mowing the lawn or some bloody stupid thing like that, and he saw me in front of the stables and he pulled up for a yarn. And two days later General Nediym arrived. He’d only just been broken in.’
A month later, this nuggetty youngster – ‘he was nondescript, by a nondescript stallion at the time’, according to the trainer – astonished his connections at his first start. He won by nine lengths at Eagle Farm, nearly running a track record. At his fourth start he won one of Australia’s coveted and rich races for two-year-olds, the Magic Millions Classic on the Gold Coast, by four lengths, before running fourth in Sydney’s Golden Slipper. General Nediym was a horse who just seemed to get faster as he got older, winning the elite Newmarket Handicap and Lightning Stakes for his training duo. Over his career he would win 13 of his 21 starts, and prize money of more than $2 million.
In fact, it’s probably fairer to say General Nediym had a training trio. Sarah Moody played a significant part in the Mitchell–Moody stable’s success through her role as trackwork rider. ‘People would call on her to ride anything, because she was a very good rider – and she knew what a good horse was,’ her husband says. ‘Bill would send these horses up and Sarah would get on them and give them a gallop and say, “These are good enough to go here, or good enough to go there. Or not. And we can have a few dollars on them.” She was instrumental in our success, riding them work. We weren’t big punters or anything like that, but we lived by our wits a bit, where we could earn a few dollars on the side. And she attracted a few good clients to the stable too.’
Given her pedigree, this was not a surprise. Sarah hailed from a racing family in New Zealand, and had even done her apprenticeship as a jockey before growing too tall for the role when she was 18. ‘I had worked with horses my whole life – I’d known horses my whole life,’ she says. ‘My mum was a very good horsewoman and I must’ve picked up a lot of stuff off her, and that obviously held me in good stead … I became quite well known for being able to “ride time”, and [for] riding any horse – strong horses and naughty horses. It didn’t matter.
‘I was quite proud of the fact that other trainers, when they needed a trackwork rider to, say, work a horse with one of theirs … they would ask for me, which was good also because it’s such a man’s industry. I’ve always said you have to be twice as good to be seen to be half as good when you’re a girl or a woman. So I suppose it was a feather in my cap that some very good trainers actually took note of that, you know? I was good at my job. So when we kicked off in Queensland, I used to ride all the gallops.’
As durable as this partnership was proving, both on and off the track, it did not lead to the Moodys’ being a ‘punting stable’. ‘No, definitely, definitely not,’ Sarah insists. ‘I work too hard for any of the dollars that I’ve got to be throwing them away. Pete was never a big punter either, but he would – if he thought a horse was going really well and was happy with the way it was going leading up to a race – he would certainly have a little bit of money on it. But this was not a regular occurrence … I do know that a couple of our clients once wanted to … you know, sort of “set” horses [for races] or what have you. And I remember Pete saying to them, “We are not a punting stable. I can tell you how well the horse is going, and I can tell you how I think it’s going to go and what have you, but I can’t be responsible if it doesn’t win and you’ve had a fortune on it.” He never wanted to be in a situation where he was responsible for someone else having a massive punt on a horse. His thing’s about training winners, not winning money as such.’
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By the mid-1990s the Mitchell–Moody stable was an up-and-coming operation, and Moody and his wife had fun as they built their professional lives. ‘We were enjoying the success that we had achieved through hard work and dedication, basically,’ Sarah says. ‘We worked bloody hard. We never really knew what was going to happen in six months’ time, but things were certainly heading in the right direction.
‘It was fun. I think it was good fun. It wasn’t socially so much fun, because we worked very hard and we had a young family. But we enjoyed it. Pete and I are horse people; we both loved the industry, so I guess our dream was coming true.’
Yet, as so often happens in racing, the success of the training partnership – and of their outstanding performer, General Nediym – led to unforeseen pressures. The stable’s Queenslandbased owners wanted too much of Moody’s time, and couldn’t quite grasp the nature of the two-city training set-up.
‘It actually got a little bit sticky in the end,’ Moody recalls. ‘[And with] General Nediym, too. When the horses were good enough to come back to Sydney, some of the [owners] didn’t want to send them back to Bill, and wanted me to come down. And it was hard.’
Other owners, too, wanted Moody in Sydney if their horse headed south for a race – something the trainer had neither the time nor the inclination to do. The situation was becoming untenable. So the Moodys worked out a 12-month exit strategy – a plan that did not include taking the stable’s best horse with them.
As much as Moody admired General Nediym and appreciated what he had achieved on the racetrack, he understood how it would look if he took the outstanding sprinter with him when he broke up his partnership with Mitchell.
‘If I separated from Bill and took General Nediym … one, in the eyes of the racing world, they’d think, “Look at this smug young bastard – he’s taken this good horse and run off.” I didn’t want people to think that at all, because that wasn’t me. And two, I was smart enough to identify [that] if I took him and he broke down or he didn’t return to form, it could end my career before it started. I think I actually even said that to Bill … The horse was at the back end of his career and I was happy for Bill to finish it off.’
But the young stallion was sent to the Sydney stable of Clarry Conners, a trainer renowned for his work with sprinters. He had another 10 starts and just one more win, before retiring to stand at stud. Significantly, General Nediym was the first of what would become a line of prominent ‘entires’ Moody handled as race horses before they retired to the breeding barn.
‘[He was] a terrific stallion,’ the trainer proclaims, nearly two decades later. ‘And until Black Caviar came along, I didn’t think I’d see one that fast again. He was probably the horse that took me up and down the east coast, because I had him and educated him in Queensland and got him going – and even when he went through to Sydney and then on through to Melbourne, I’d travel with him most of the time, under Bill’s tuition and care.
‘Listen, you do build a rapport. You get to know their idiosyncrasies and that. But at the same time, you’ve got to be mindful that you’ve got a stable full of horses. The bad ones probably require more time than the good ones … but no, you get
to know their habits and likes and dislikes – and obviously you try to keep them as comfortable and as happy as possible.’
On racing’s global stage, thoroughbred pedigrees have never been more significant, and the best ones never more lucrative. ‘Making a stallion’ – that is, developing a brilliant two-year-old or three-year-old colt into an outstanding four- or five-year-old – can be parlayed into a syndicated stud career worth $10 million, $40 million, even $60 million. This is the jackpot in a breeding lottery 400 years old, and it’s what every trainer dreams of: another hallmark of professional acumen in contemporary racing. In achieving this, Bill Mitchell and Peter Moody were well ahead of the curve.
As a result of General Nediym’s unexpected impact at stud, finding good colts became almost a stock-in-trade for Peter Moody. More than any other young Australian trainer in this era, he has had success well beyond the realms of chance.
But to perfect his technique, Moody would have to move to the city many believe is the heart of Australian horse racing: Melbourne.
5
THOROUGHBREDS IN AUSTRALIA race in what is widely promoted as a drug-free zone. Performance-enhancing substances, however innocuous they might seem to trainers trying to keep horses sound and strong through demanding racing preparations, cannot be present in a horse’s system on race day. Gone are the days of the replenishing steroids, the ‘milkshakes’ and tonics of unknown origins. Chemical assistance is a thing of bygone aeons, when racing was wild and romantic, and under-policed.
At least, that’s what the racing authorities are striving for. If anyone has an advantage on race day, it should come from superior horsemanship, a stable’s ability to train without the aid of pharmaceutical boosters. And from genuine, sound horses. Great effort goes into policing these relatively new and robust rules. Before and after every race, in every state, racing stewards – the industry’s sheriffs – direct that certain runners’ urine samples be ‘swabbed’, to ensure that all are competing on a fair, drug-free racetrack.
Still, authorities fear that racing’s chemists are three steps ahead of their testing regimes, constantly developing smarter, more invisible versions of the old ‘elephant juices’ that bedevilled Australian racing in the 1970s and ’80s. The aim way back then was simple: find a ‘rocket fuel’ to make a horse go faster, no matter what effect that effort, or the substance itself, had on the animal. Now, the science is slicker, as it is for human athletes. Speed is not the only quality that can be induced and nurtured, of course – and there will always be some who want to get an edge, insiders believe, no matter the risks.
In keeping with Australian racing’s push for a drug-free culture, a routine urine swab was taken from Lidari on the afternoon he ran second in the Turnbull Stakes. For over three months afterwards, Peter Moody heard nothing more about the procedure. With the stallion back at OTI Racing co-owner Simon O’Donnell’s farm in Kilmore, in north-east Victoria, for a summer break, stable life at Moody Racing rolled on as usual. Had the trainer known what the stewards knew within several weeks of that sample being taken on 4 October 2014, many things might have been different.
The results indicated a serious irregularity: the horse had raced with an elevated level of cobalt in his system. In Australia, the allowable race-day threshold at the time was 200 micrograms per litre of urine. Double the international standard, this took into account the fact that cobalt is often contained in standard, legally sanctioned vitamin treatments and feed supplements used by most racing stables around the country.
Underpinning this new rule was concern that a high dose of cobalt has a toxic effect on a horse, even as it mimics the effects of EPO by assisting the production of more red blood cells, which then pumps more oxygen through the horse’s system. It is also argued that more cobalt allows equine athletes to compete at a higher level for longer. In other words, the naturally occurring trace element is not a new ‘go-fast’ drug; rather, it may enhance endurance and assist in allowing horses to perform at a ‘sustained peak for longer’, and so be a ‘natural’ way of blood doping when abused.
But while major international research studies are still underway, a paper published in the Veterinary Journal in 2015 bluntly stated that ‘currently there is no evidence to suggest that cobalt chloride can enhance human or equine performance’. Professor Ali Mobasheri, head of the University of Surrey’s veterinary department, wrote that, aside from the lack of evidence for enhanced athletic performance in horses, ‘one of the key concerns is the paucity of information about the long-term safety of cobalt chloride administration and toxicity, especially in vital organs’.
More simply, the main issue of cobalt abuse could be one of equine welfare rather than performance enhancement. ‘In the US there have been reports of unexplained deaths in horses that were found to have elevated blood levels of cobalt chloride,’ Mobasheri’s paper continued. ‘Although cobalt salts have medical applications for the treatment of anaemia, cobalt can be highly toxic. It exerts well-known and well-documented neurotoxic effects, in addition to its toxic actions on the thyroid, the heart and the haematopoietic system.
‘High doses of cobalt in patients exposed to abnormal levels from damaged hip prostheses induce optic and auditory neuropathy. Furthermore, there are reports that cobalt exposure may lead to fatal cardiomyopathy and ischaemic heart disease in cobalt-exposed workers and occurred in regular beer drinkers who had consumed beer from breweries with cobalt contamination.
‘It is also worth commenting that cobalt–drug interactions are unknown, which could be significant as racehorses commonly receive non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and, in some racing jurisdictions, can race on furosemide medication.’
In a media statement that accompanied the paper, Mobasheri emphasised that the research team had ‘grave concerns over a potentially lethal practice in the [racing] industry, and are most concerned that some trainers continue to use Google as their source of information. It is the duty of veterinary surgeons working in the industry to ensure that horse trainers are aware of the dangers of its “amateur” use.’
There seems little argument about the damaging impact cobalt can have, especially when given in high doses to humans and horses over extended periods. Work done by Mary Scollay, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission’s equine medical director, expands on this, and highlights serious welfare concerns.
Initially, Dr Scollay said, she was keen to test the assumption that, since cobalt induced the stimulation of red blood cells in humans, it would do the same in horses. ‘Why wouldn’t it?’ she surmised before starting the study. ‘But we have not seen that.’ Instead, her work with a ‘herd’ of research horses showed that high doses of cobalt led to profuse sweating, restless circling, muscle trembling and caused some horses to drop to their knees, or to briefly collapse. She also noted abnormal clotting in the blood she collected from horses in her study.
‘What was in the test tubes almost looked like lava lamps, with these globs of stuff kind of floating around,’ Scollay reported. This suggested a worrying side effect in relation to how hard, and how long, a horse might bleed when galloping. ‘Once the bleeding starts, if the clotting mechanism is impaired or doesn’t function, that bleed is going to last longer and, as a result, be more severe,’ the equine specialist said. ‘You have to ask yourself if any performance-enhancement that might result from the cobalt … is going to be negated by the fact that the horse is bleeding into his lungs in a fairly uncontrolled manner.
‘I’ve seen some cobalt administration at the doses that our intelligence tells us were being used,’ Mary Scollay said, ‘and it was pretty darn hard to watch. It was dramatic.’
In 2013 harness racing authorities in Australia were hit by a spate of cases in which horses returned unusually high levels of cobalt, and their colleagues overseeing thoroughbred racing quickly took on board the research done to that point, and conclusions reached in the ‘red hots’. The cobalt guidelines, so generous by global standards, were adopted
in Victoria in April 2014, and at a national level on 1 January 2015.
At the time, not everyone was convinced of cobalt’s effects – and nor are they now. Debate continues around the world about the testing that has and has not been done on the effects of the substance, to precisely ascertain its impact. All agree that the threshold set by Australian racing authorities was fair, almost too fair. No horse can get close to that reading, most scientists say, unless it has been injected with a dose of cobalt chlorine. And that would be an illegal injection for an Australian thoroughbred.
The concentration of cobalt detected in Lidari’s initial urine sample on 4 October was 380 micrograms per litre; the B-sample returned an even higher reading of 410 micrograms per litre. Suddenly, Peter Moody – the internationally renowned horseman who had more than 100 horses in work at Caulfield, with 200 more waiting to come into his stable, a man who trained for some of the most influential owners in the country – was gazing at a new horizon, bordered by negative headlines.
On 13 January 2015, 14 weeks after Lidari had run in the race at Flemington, the trainer was informed of his horse’s excessively high ‘positive’, and asked to explain how Lidari had so much cobalt in his system at the time. If he could not, he was staring at possible charges being laid that carried a raft of severe penalties. The worst-case scenario included disqualification as a licensed trainer for three years.
Moody was not on his own at the edge of this cliff. By mid-January 2015, four other trainers in Melbourne alone were embroiled in the cobalt controversy. Although they had not yet been charged, they had already been tarred cobalt blue, and dubbed the ‘Cobalt Five’.
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Peter Moody and his staff were given time to explain to the stewards how Lidari and cobalt had become so intertwined. To make clear his position at this stage, he issued a media statement:
‘I’m devastated to be informed by Racing Victoria stewards that one of my runners has tested positive to a banned substance during the 2014 Spring Carnival,’ it read. ‘I have no knowledge or understanding as to how this could occur and will work with Racing Victoria Integrity Service department to bring this matter to a conclusion as soon as possible.
