by Helen Thomas
‘I take great pride in my role in thoroughbred racing in Victoria and strive to manage my business and support my wonderful group of owners and staff with the highest levels of honesty and professionalism. I will continue to the goal [sic] over the next few months, and do everything possible to clear my name. I will make no further comment until its conclusion.’
The stewards were more restrained in their comments. ‘We have had the drug’s presence [in Lidari] confirmed by labs in Western Australia and Hong Kong,’ said Terry Bailey, Racing Victoria’s chief steward.
It was not the first time the two men had been at odds in racing’s robust public arena. Nor would it be the last. Another ‘Queensland boy made good’, Bailey is as big and as bold a presence as Moody. He is also as passionate about racing, although he comes at it from an entirely different perspective. Growing up in Rockhampton, not too far from the Moody family in Charleville, Bailey went to the races with his father, who worked as a weekend steward at ‘Rocky’ and surrounding tracks and the trots on Saturday nights.
Like his fellow Queenslander, Bailey left school early – at 15 – preferring a job in the office of the Rockhampton Jockey Club. It wasn’t long before John Schreck, Australia’s most respected racing steward, tapped him on the shoulder and convinced him to move to Sydney.
‘The Sheriff ’, as Schreck is still known internationally – having run the stewards’ room in Hong Kong as well as Sydney, and wrangled Australia’s notorious Fine Cotton and Jockey Tapes scandals – was a hard marker, but saw real promise in his Queensland ‘import’. After three years under Schreck’s watchful eye, Bailey took up a position as a steward in Orange, four hours west of Sydney in rural New South Wales; eight years later he became chief steward on the Gold Coast. He was 28, and clearly another young man on a mission. It surprised no one when he moved south with his wife in 2001 to become Harness Racing Victoria’s new boss.
Shockwaves soon followed when a raid by stewards and police uncovered 62 vials of an illegal drug known as ‘blue magic’ at a property outside Ballarat. The scandal ended with the suicides of two key ‘racing identities’ charged over the matter.
Terry Bailey was the obvious choice to take over from Racing Victoria’s chief steward Des Gleeson when he retired in August 2008. By now 40, Bailey was a tough nut not easily rattled, a young sheriff keen to shake up an old town. As one racing scribe quipped at the time, he’d risen through the ranks so quickly that ‘if he’d been a horse, they would have swabbed him’.
Bailey’s mettle was tested over the next couple of years, as he initially went toe-to-toe with leviathan Irish trainer Aidan O’Brien about how his horses had performed in the 2008 Melbourne Cup, and then clashed with jockeys to curb their ‘overuse’ of whips. His presence was felt. But an ongoing battle with one particular rider made mainstream headlines nationally in 2012.
Early that spring, Terry Bailey alleged that Danny Nikolic – a gifted jockey whose career was marred by run-ins with stewards, as well as his own temper – had threatened him while they were both working at Seymour Racecourse. The chief steward said that, as he was climbing the ladder to reach the stewards’ tower at the country track, Nikolic stopped him. ‘We’ve all got families, cunt – and we know where yours live, cunt,’ Bailey claims the jockey told him.
There were no witnesses, but a photograph of a cocky Nikolic leaning in to talk to Bailey as he turns on the ladder of the stewards’ tower at least confirms the two men exchanged words. The jockey was charged with threatening a steward and eventually disqualified for two years.
Now, three years later, the chief steward was again standing square-jawed and firm, this time pitting himself against one of the three best-known names in Australian racing. If Bart Cummings was forever the ‘Cups King’, and Gai Waterhouse the sport’s queen, Peter Moody was surely the prince-in-waiting – a man few claimed to know well, but whom racing fans felt comfortable calling ‘Moods’.
Bailey and Moody had come through a stoush less than a year earlier, after a stewards’ edict that all trainers at Flemington and Caulfield hand over the keys to their stables to allow racing authorities unimpeded access. The trainer had been strident in his criticism of the policy, resigning from the Australian Trainers Association in protest over the issue. ‘How much is too much?’ he asked at the time. ‘Will they want the keys to my house, my car? Where are we going to draw the line in the sand?’
In the end, he was the lone hold-out; by mid-April 2014 the impasse was broken, with the chief steward insisting that ‘any misunderstanding between the stewards and Peter Moody regarding the requirements of Rule 8B has now been resolved between both parties’.
While the air had been cleared, the incident seemed to leave both men unsettled. One thing was certain: it was in neither’s character to back down. A mighty new rumble, centred on cobalt, was the best tip in town.
*
Two of the four other trainers embroiled in the cobalt investigation, albeit in significantly different circumstances, were also prominent Victorian racing personalities: Mark Kavanagh, who had won a Melbourne Cup with Shocking and trained a brilliant filly called Atlantic Jewel, and his neighbour at Flemington, Danny O’Brien. Father-and-son team Lee and Shannon Hope were also in the stewards’ sights. But Moody was by far the biggest name to be caught up in the matter, which quickly made international news.
Australian vets were also under fire, with the vexed issue of their registration (or lack of it) being discussed as a serious issue. ‘Veterinary experts claim cobalt doping needs to be at near toxic levels to be effective, making horses “run like beasts, but you only get two or three good races out of them and then they’re done”,’ wrote journalist Michael Hutak. ‘The issue has again put the animal’s welfare on the front pages and has raised the temperature on an age-old push to make equine vets who work with racehorses licensed and fully subject to the oversight of stewards, in just the same way as trainers, jockeys and stablehands have for, yes, hundreds of years.
‘The vets’ professional associations have resisted licencing since “time immemorial” and Racing NSW chief steward Ray Murrihy told me that he had proposed such oversight twice over the years to no avail. One leading racing vet told me that Racing NSW “have their eye on a couple of rogue vets, we all know who they are”, who are doing untold damage to the game,’ Hutak, who edited The Gadfly column in the Sun-Herald through the 1990s, continued.
His remarks quickly proved prescient, as Tom Brennan – a vet based at the Flemington Equine Clinic – was first linked to and then charged over the Kavanagh and O’Brien cases, as well as a similar matter in New South Wales involving Kavanagh’s son Sam.
That young trainer told Racing NSW stewards that he had seen one horse have an adverse reaction after being treated by a Flemington Equine Clinic–supplied drip. He described Midsummer Sun as ‘shaking, trembling, sweating up’ after treatment, while Catherine Brown, a vet working at the clinic, said another horse had ‘sweated up like crazy and had veins popping out of its skin’.
But Brennan had nothing to do with Peter Moody’s stable at Caulfield. So over the next few months, the trainer and his staff tried to unravel what had occurred with Lidari. Nothing jumped out at them, because their feeding and supplement routine was as it had been for years. Nothing new had been added or subtracted, and cobalt was not on anyone’s agenda. The only thing that might have happened, he told the stewards, was that a supplement the horse had been given leading up to the race contained the substance and might somehow have ‘spiked’ in his system.
Taking this on board, the stewards tried to replicate the scenario, testing Lidari’s feeding and supplement menu on a control group of six mares. The results did not match. So on the morning of 10 July 2015, Racing Victoria’s chief steward walked into Peter Moody’s office in what had once been quite a stately residence on Kambrook Road, Caulfield, to issue him with three charges relating to Lidari’s positive swab result.
Under the Australian
Rules of Racing, it was alleged that Moody ‘administered, or caused to be administered, the prohibited substance cobalt for the purpose of affecting the performance of Lidari in the race’; that he ‘administered, or caused to be administered, the prohibited substance cobalt, which was detected in a sample taken from Lidari prior to or following its race’; and that he ‘brought Lidari to race with the prohibited substance cobalt in its system’.
It was not a long meeting. It did not need to be. But the trainer recalls it was tense. When Bailey and his small team left, Moody phoned the few people he trusted. The first call was to his wife, the next to Brett Cavanough. His old friend was shocked. ‘Well, I know how straight [Moody] is,’ he says.
Cavanough recalls their conversation vividly, and was asked to recount it to stewards several months later. ‘The stewards came to my office and said, “We need to have a yarn to you, a debrief about Peter Moody.” They said, “We checked his phone records and it looks like he rang you about three minutes after we left his office; can you tell us what the conversation was?”
‘I said, “Yeah, I can.” ‘I said, “He rang me and said, ‘I’m fucked – cobalt’s got me. Someone’s got at me. Here’s 20 years of hard work all down the drain. Here’s Hong Kong out the window.’”
‘You know, he was in a state of shock at the time. He was almost emotional. He knew the repercussions of it all, and he’s never been like that. He’s never had a grubby name. We all live in the limits of therapeutic drugs, but if you’d said to me, “Peter Moody’s using this,” I would say, “No, because he’s too frightened.”’
For Cavanough, the charges simply did not fit with the trainer he had known for most of his life. Moody might have looked to the world like a big, bluff character, but Cavanough knew the man behind the persona. ‘He’s always been a good boy, don’t get me wrong,’ he says. ‘That’s why he’s never done drugs. The only thing he would ever have done [wrong] is a wheelie in a car, and probably went and drove fast. That’s probably the only bad habit he’s ever got, away from smoking. Driving fast and smoking cigarettes.’
Presenting a horse at the races with a positive reading was bad enough; to have two charges of ‘administration’ levelled against him looked damning. Without doubt, they would have an immediate impact on his business, not to mention his professional focus. They could destroy his career.
Publicly, it was clear that Peter Moody understood the ‘optics’ of the scenario. If no one else could stand up for him at this point, he would do it himself. He had nothing to lose, and was especially riled by the insinuation that he was a cheat.
‘I was very disappointed to be charged with administration of a prohibited substance,’ he told the media. ‘That takes away all of your credibility and unfortunately, the greater media are putting out there that you’re a cheat. I pride myself on my reputation. I don’t need to cheat. There probably hasn’t been a more consistent stable in Australia over the last 10 years than mine. I’m financially viable. I’m not a punter. I’ve got a lot of horses and one throws up this irregularity … To have your name muddied, it’s very hurtful … I love this industry, it has been great to me and I think that I’ve been great to it, too.’
Moody tried to explain why Lidari had needed a supplement added to his daily feed. For the first time, the racing world learned of the stallion’s ‘shelly’ hooves. ‘He wasn’t receiving treatment for a hoof injury as such,’ he said. ‘We were trying to promote hoof growth and he was on a treatment, a powdered substance that was purchased through the local feed supplier. Unbeknown to me, it had a concentration of cobalt in it, and this particular substance had a high ratio of cobalt in it.’
The explanation sounded plausible, if unsophisticated. For his part, Terry Bailey made clear that the trainer’s theory had been tested by stewards and found not to explain the high cobalt reading. ‘He was using a powder that contained some cobalt for treatment for a horse’s hooves. That trial test has been done, and those results don’t explain these levels,’ he said.
Bailey went on to say that he believed there were only two possible explanations for illegal cobalt levels: a horse has either ‘received large doses prior to race day, or received race-day treatment’.
It was already clear that a thorough understanding of chemistry would be necessary if one wished to fully understand the matter when it reached the Racing Appeals and Disciplinary Board. But a date for that hearing was not yet set. Given the saga was unfolding just months out from the start of Melbourne’s internationally famous Spring Racing Carnival, Australia’s favourite trainer was clearly in strife.
Six months earlier, Peter Moody had believed he didn’t need a lawyer when the stewards had informed him of Lidari’s positive cobalt swab. Now it was apparent he needed one with a proper grasp of racing law and a thorough knowledge of the way a stable functioned. Most importantly, Moody needed someone familiar with the sweeping nuances of the turf. A barrister, in other words, who knew how to play the ponies.
On the advice of owner and sports commentator Simon O’Donnell, the trainer engaged Matthew Stirling.
6
WHEN PETER MOODY parted ways with Bill Mitchell in December 1998, he had a good base to build on. With about 50 horses in work in Brisbane, and the same number in pre-training, he says around 90 per cent of the Brisbane stable’s owners decided to go with him.
This meant that, unlike most young trainers striking out on their own, who might be happy with half a dozen horses in their stalls, Moody had 70 or 80. ‘So it was a great start and I’m forever indebted to Bill for that time,’ he admits. ‘But at the same time, I don’t feel I owe Bill anything for it, because I worked bloody hard for him and for ourselves, and I probably only took what was rightfully mine. But it was a great opportunity to kick off [like that] – and to have the backing of Sarah. And Mum was very important then too, because we had a young family and it was a testing time.’
In fact, Jan Moody did more than help with the children: she handled the new stable’s accounts. It was all the sweeter, then, when this family-run stable’s first runner ran well and was only beaten by a head at the Sunshine Coast: all the women in the trainer’s life were there for the ride.
Females, in fact, would continue to play an integral part of Peter Moody’s story from this time on. While he and Billy Mitchell had struck gold with General Nedyim, fillies and mares were about to reshape his life, even though some of them weren’t very good. At least, not before they arrived at his stable door.
A handful of astute thoroughbred breeders realised that Moody was adept at revitalising the racing careers of fillies and their older female counterparts. Not only could he rejuvenate them physically, he could also reignite their interest in competing. Mental agility, as much as physical prowess, was always a key factor in Moody’s training system.
One of his earliest supporters was New South Wales breeder Stuart Ramsey, owner of Turangga Farm in the Segenhoe Valley. This was the property where Hong Kong’s star galloper Able Friend was born and reared – a foal, according to Ramsey, with ‘a face only a mother could love’, who went on to become one of the world’s finest race horses – as well as good local gallopers like Karuta Queen and Zizou.
‘We’re basically farmers and stockmen … we’re not stockbrokers,’ Ramsey reflected in 2015. ‘I’ve come from an auctioneering background and I’ve been with horses before I could walk. My son has been doing it since he could walk. It makes a big difference. I don’t care whether I’m breeding pigs, chooks, or whatever – I like breeding things.’
Breeding good fillies who could become better broodmares was Stuart Ramsey’s particular passion, and he and Moody bonded easily when introduced by a mutual friend in Brisbane two decades ago. ‘[He’s] just a down-to-earth bush bloke like myself, you know?’ Ramsey insists. ‘And he’s a man’s man. He was on his way up from the bush, he’d been educated well.’
The first horse Ramsey gave the novice was a filly called Wichita, who came up fro
m Lee Freedman’s yard in Melbourne. ‘She was actually given to Billy Mitchell, when [Moody] was working for Billy,’ Ramsey says. ‘She won two, I think, in Brisbane.’ Bigger things would follow. ‘We started to send him a few more, we had a few good fillies like Niagara Falls, and [then] he moved to Melbourne and I said, “Well, we’ll give you all of them to start with.”’
The forthright owner/breeder has a particular view about what makes a good trainer: ‘Common sense and the ability to work and attention to detail. You don’t have to be the best horseman in the world to be the best trainer. I’ve never really seen Peter really work with horses, only at the races. But all I know is probably most of the leading trainers are better organisers than they are horsemen.’
This includes Australia’s master trainer, Bart Cummings. ‘[I] knew him well, [and] Bart had his systems – he was a great systems man … But yeah, [Moody is] well in front of even Bart.’ Ramsey’s is a surprising assessment, but does make sense given the winning run the two ‘bushies’ shared.
Moody recalls the partnership fondly. ‘We had a lot of success [with] Stuart breeding fillies and mares,’ he says, ‘but also buying fillies and mares that had performed at early ages, but hadn’t trained on. And we got them and rejuvenated them. You know, you make a slow horse run fast, and you try and get a good horse back on its feet. And we had a lot of success doing that, and that attracted a lot of breeders to our stables. That initial success.’
Re-energising horses is one thing, but getting them to have confidence in their own ability again is another. The trainer had the knack of doing both.
‘We got the job done nicely and placed them well,’ Moody says, ‘and we always worked on the proviso that you win the weakest race you can with a filly, and if you can win [at] their first start, bonus; you get that out of the way, and then you look for city performances, and then stakes class performances, and slowly build. We still try and do it today, [but] that was the backbone of our stable as breeders supported us.’
