Moods

by Helen Thomas

  Carbrecel Park is now a light-filled, contemporary home with an expansive outdoor deck and beautifully maintained paddocks, which are used by Sarah’s equestrian horses alongside spelling race horses. But a small picture of the original house, hanging just off the living room, ensures it is not forgotten.

  ‘I look back on those times now and think, “Oh my God,” you know, “how did we do it?”’ Sarah laughs. ‘We’d bitten off a huge chunk, wanting to be successful in this industry down here, and I think we were just very lucky that we believed in ourselves. I think that’s what it was. We believed in ourselves and … we had amazing support from one another, and you look at your little kids laughing and and having fun and playing, and that’s what you do it for.’

  It was during these early Melbourne days, too, that Peter Moody forged what would prove one of his most significant professional partnerships – with jockey Luke Nolen. Like Moody, the 22-year-old was born and raised in the country; his hometown was Manangatang, in Victoria’s Mallee region. Nolen’s father was a former jockey and rodeo bull rider who ultimately became a trainer, and the family roved between country towns as far away as Dalby, in Queensland’s Darling Downs, as he found work.

  His shy son had his first ride on a pony before he was even a year old, so it was no surprise that by the time he was a teenager Luke Nolen wanted to work with horses, and he returned to his home state to do so. Indentured as an apprentice to noted horseman Gerald Egan in Mansfield, in the state’s high country, Nolen made his riding debut at Wangaratta in January 1998. His first winner came three months later at Albury; he was 16. But this success came after almost a year with his ‘master’, who put him to work breaking in young horses. With his uncanny ability to calm them, Nolen was a natural. ‘He is very balanced,’ Egan said in 2012. ‘He can sit for hours on a two-inch rail like a bird.’

  For Egan, the biggest challenge was not teaching Nolen how to ride as much as it was encouraging him to talk. ‘His father brought him down with his bike and a swag on the back of a ute,’ the trainer said. ‘And we went inside and had a cuppa and Luke wouldn’t make eye contact for about a week. He was shy, like a timid pup. That was the main thing he had to work on, to come out of his shell.’

  Egan, who trained the equine stars of The Man from Snowy River – and also rode in the film as a stunt double – saw great potential in Nolen. ‘Because of his laid-back nature, horses would go for him,’ he said. ‘They would never play up and buck. [It was] just his relaxed way.’

  The city beckoned for the young jockey blessed with natural good looks as well as riding skill, and with it came the lure of the focus-stealing trappings of success. He was one of Victoria’s best apprentices by the late 1990s but Nolen admits he was soon planning his rides around water-skiing and snowboarding trips. When Peter Moody came along in 2003, it was a time in Luke Nolen’s life when he needed a new cornerstone.

  ‘I was probably on a downward turn at the stage I met him,’ Nolen says now. ‘Albeit I’d had a little bit of success as an apprentice, but I [had] sort of rested on my laurels a bit. And I was probably on racing’s scrapheap for a bit. I was riding, but I was riding far and away. I was riding, just not regularly; there was no regular trackwork, or race riding for that matter. I was surviving, but …’

  This drop-off in work certainly wasn’t by design.

  ‘There wasn’t many jobs there that I was going to have any chance of getting to warrant extra effort for. But I was just happy to cruise a bit. Then Pete’s come along and threw me a lifeline. It was about the same stage I probably needed to hurry up and make a decision, whether or not I was going to be a jockey, or I was going to go and be a plumber or a chippy or something.’

  Even at the time, Nolen realised he was in a spiral, a trajectory sadly well worn in Australian racing circles.

  ‘You think at 22, you can be legally charged as an adult. But some men, particularly, [who] find money early in their lives seem to take longer to grow up as a result. I know that racing’s littered with men that have poor decisions with a lot of money early in their careers. I was fortunate; I wasn’t a great example of that. But nevertheless, I think I did my fair share of squandering.’

  Luke Nolen, Melbourne racing’s pin-up boy gone astray, needed a stable to ride for regularly, as well as a straight-talking guide. He and Moody ‘clicked straight away’, he says. Even so, the trainer made him work for his place in the yard.

  ‘I was riding a lot of horses at the time, but I wasn’t riding any superstars. I wasn’t riding, really, for any main trainers, and it’s always useful to be riding for a main trainer because you can [build] a race card around them. They might be taking three horses to a country meeting, so you can work up around them; you get your three [rides] from them and … it’s always a good jumping-off point.’

  Peter Moody’s stable was starting to make an impact, and Luke Nolen found he wanted to be a part of it. He was especially keen to be there early in the mornings to ride trackwork with the team. But the trainer waited until the jockey had notched up 20 winners for the yard before allowing him to join them at dawn.

  ‘It was unusual for the fact that I kept asking to come in and he said, “No,”’ Nolen says. ‘So it snowballed from there. The more winners I rode, the more opportunity I got. Pete gave me a very big lifeline.’ Within the decade, he would become Victoria’s three-time premiership-winning rider, between 2009 and 2012.

  The jockey is savvy enough to realise he blossomed in the ‘structured employer–employee relationship’ that Moody established. ‘He’s the boss and it’s his name on the licence, and I respect that,’ he says. ‘And we have a mutual respect; we work very well together as a result. He’s a genuine, loyal person and he wears his heart on his sleeve a bit, and that offends [some people] … but yeah, that’s the sort of person he is. For most part, he’s a bit of a joker, but on big mornings when there’s a lot going on, he’s not quick to temper, but he’s quick to assert. But being a boss, I guess that’s what he’s got to be.’

  As well as noting that Moody ‘smokes for Australia’, the jockey recognised that his mentor liked to do most things himself. If he was not quite a control freak, he certainly preferred to rely on his own judgement most of the time. ‘I suppose it’s a trust thing,’ Nolen says. ‘He’s had people in positions at his place for a long time, but he still does everything himself.’

  This tallies with an observation Tony Haydon made to Robert Smerdon, another of Moody’s training neighbours at Caulfield. ‘Tony told me he’d have all these racing colours,’ Smerdon says, ‘and after a race meeting, we’ve got a woman here who washes them. But [Moody] used to take them home and wash them himself.’

  Haydon also shared a more telling anecdote with Smerdon. ‘Some mornings there, when he’d have good chances in big races, [Moody would] be roaring and screaming and bellowing and doing his work, just hyped up, and Tony said, “Oh, that’s way better than he used to be.” He said when [Moody] first started training with a lot less horses and a lot more inferior horses, “I used to be standing in front of him with a wide-mouth shovel and a bottle of Valium, just to put it in to get him to relax.”’

  Fortunately for Luke Nolen, such anxiety never translated to the mounting yard on race days, big or small. ‘The person you see at the races, he’s very serious, but he leaves you [alone] at big races,’ the jockey says. ‘He leaves you in a good mental state, a good mindspace, leaving the yard. He doesn’t bully you, he doesn’t do anything like that and particularly in big races, he gives you a bit of free rein.’

  A decade after arriving at the Moody stable – by which time Nolen had married, started a family, bought a property on the Mornington Peninsula and ridden all of the stable’s stars along the way – he would have repaid his hard taskmaster handsomely. For now, though, he did the hard yards.

  Nolen rode at the big meetings in town, and happily ‘globetrotted’ around the state with stable stalwarts who were not quite up to that city standard. Oc
casionally, he travelled to South Australia, Queensland and even Tasmania, on lightning visits with the team – riding in races Peter Moody had targeted, often making the trip for just one runner.

  As they worked together, the pair learned to trust each other’s instincts. And the young jockey watched the trainer gain in confidence as his experience broadened.

  ‘As a trainer, he’s continued to evolve, just in different working patterns with horses and trying different things,’ Nolen says. ‘Some people just get into a position where they say, “This will work – it worked for this good run we had, and we’ll stay there.” But Pete’s continued to evolve, trying to better himself as a trainer, even experimentally so, with different work regimes with horses.

  ‘Everyone was set in their way when I was an apprentice. [Horses] had to have 10,000 kilometres in their legs before they took on a Melbourne Cup, things like that. The old Bart Cummings style. It wasn’t until you saw the Europeans come out – and they were never run for six weeks, they were never run for two months! They’d run first up in the Caulfield Cup, or Melbourne Cup. And everyone was bewildered by it; they said, “How can you do that?” Pete was one of the first ones, particularly in Victoria, to adopt that style.’

  As Moody Racing’s Caulfield stable continued to grow, adding more horses to its roster and names to its winners list, trainers working alongside Peter Moody started noting his different approach to even the most basic elements of the work they all did.

  At the stable before dawn most mornings to rouse his staff and check how each horse had rested through the night, Moody would then walk out to the centre of the racecourse and the ‘trainers’ tower’, where he and his colleagues – neighbours at breakfast, competitors by lunchtime – oversaw their charges’ track gallops. This is not a lifestyle everyone is suited to, and takes a heavy toll on the undisciplined. As Moody thrived, physically and emotionally, so too did one of his peers: Mick Price.

  Revered as one of Australia’s most astute trainers, a professional so direct in conversation that some find him curt, Price has an expert eye for a horse and zero tolerance for foolish or inappropriate behaviour. He has known Moody for well over a decade, and has no hesitation in assessing his work practices.

  Price first noticed the way the trainer would swim some horses and exercise others without a rider, taking the weight off their backs as they went through their early-morning paces; a smaller horse with a jockey in the saddle would ride alongside.

  ‘Here at Caulfield, he’s been a big user of ponies and leading horses off ponies – especially fillies, light geldings, not so much colts – as part of the exercise, but not riding as such,’ Price says. ‘So I would have said I took note of that and thought it was a good idea, especially as the rules changed in our industry.’

  Price watched the younger trainer adapt to these changes, and innovate. ‘There’s no anabolic steroids [permitted] now, where 14 years ago there were some,’ he says. ‘So, you know, we’ve got to train our way round these sorts of things. We’re training athletes, and the athletes are all under pressure at some point.’

  Peter Moody explains that he tries to see things from the horses’ perspective. ‘Every time I take a horse out of the box, I won’t want them to know what they’re going to do – I want them to be excited when they’re going to work, because I know how boring it can be for me coming here to do it,’ he says, with a nod. ‘So I don’t want them in the same state of mind I [have] at times. Getting a horse physically fit’s common sense. Keeping it mentally fit – I think [that’s] the heart of a race horse trainer.’

  *

  Every thoroughbred trainer, good, bad or indifferent, needs a constant supply of horses. That’s why the annual yearling sales are such a crucial part of training life. Every year, a new crop of foals is born across Australia, and a new batch of yearlings offered for sale. Thousands of them.

  Most of these young horses are required to parade around sale rings in Sydney, Melbourne, the Gold Coast, Adelaide, Tasmania and Perth; some are sold privately. Either way, trainers need to see as many of the youngsters as they can, before deciding which ones they want to buy and add to their rosters.

  Some buyers wait to see the yearlings at the sales. The most dedicated arrange to see them on the farms that rear them. This can involve days of travel. For many years now, a small group of trainers, including Mick Price and Peter Moody, has done these inspection tours together, with Moody organising the logistics.

  ‘We do a tour of New South Wales every year, where at seven o’clock we’re here doing 24 yearlings, at 8.15 we’re there doing 21, and so it goes for the whole way around the Hunter Valley for five days,’ Price says. ‘And we’re within five minutes of every farm we go to – it’s unbelievable how [Moody] times it. He drives – he’s the boss. “Get in the car – come on, boys” – that’s him. A natural-born leader, and I admire that in him. I think that if you are in any kind of pressure situation and you are with him, you’ll be with the right bloke.’

  Underpinning Peter Moody’s love of horses is a voracious appetite for military history and war heroes – General Sir John Monash in particular. While Price confesses he is tired of hearing about Australia’s famous commander and the planning that led up to the 1918 Battle of Amiens in northern France, it surprises no one who knows Moody that he is transfixed by these soldiers and what they lived through. ‘He’s big, he’s strong, he’s [got] plenty of “yap-yap” about him and he would have been a leader,’ Price says.

  The trainer believes his friend ‘obviously had a feel for horses from being on the land’, before adding to that innate knowledge by working for T.J. Smith and Bill Mitchell. ‘He’s a quick learner and he’s got a great feel for race horses. He’s a good judge of a yearling and he absorbs a lot of information quickly. As a horse trainer, he’s probably got his own way of doing things. I heard him say that people have copied him. You know he’s not short of an ego, I’ll say that, and that’s fine.’

  From the start, Mick Price recognised that Moody was larger than life, a character shaped by the country he comes from. ‘Everything he does is big. It’s on a big scale. He eats big, he talks big, he is big. Who goes to Costco with a two-horse float to buy dunny paper? Who does it? Unless you’re running a boarding school. He says, “Oh, it’s cheap, mate, I’ve got [three] daughters in there.” And he’ll buy 50 jars of Vegemite [and] jam like that. He’s a big thinker, and a big worker, and everything he does is big, you know?’

  Price admires what Moody has achieved with the land he bought, too. ‘He’s transformed his probably 18–20 square bluestone house up on the hill on 25 acres into … we call it the Dallas of Belgrave South. We often have said to him that he should get the big pair of horns out the front, you know? Bobby Big Bucks, that’s him.’

  But the trainer maintains that, at his core, his perennial rival and friend is much the same man he met in 2002, even as his business boomed. ‘Look, I think the basic human being himself has not changed. He is a beer-drinking lad from Wyandra … He’s [a] big, robust, high-energy sort of person. I think you need to be a high-energy sort of person to be a good horse trainer, [a] high-energy person who is very good at his job …

  ‘I think he’s adapted to being a big, successful horse trainer … But the basic Peter Moody that I’ve known from 14 years ago to now [is the same]. Big-eating, XXXX Gold drinker – that’s medium strength. He’s not a big drinker, and there’s some relevance in what I say, because his father came from a background which Peter didn’t necessarily want to follow, and Peter’s done a very, very good job just on the mid-strength. They say some people have addictive personalities – well, you know, big smoker, big drinker – but rarely, rarely would you see him at all tipsy as such.’

  For more than a decade, Robert Smerdon has shared the trainers’ tower out in the middle of the Caulfield track with both Price and Moody. Another distinguished horseman and professional who also calls it as he sees it, Smerdon also sees the boy from t
he bush as ‘a bit larger than life as a character’, and has great regard for Peter Moody’s attention to detail.

  ‘I’m a fair bit older than him,’ Smerdon says, ‘but he’ll tell you things he’s observed and you think, “Well, that’s pretty astute.” He soaks [up] information. To me, he’s a very intelligent bloke, and he’s capable of doing a number of things at the one time.

  ‘We joke about his listening capacity – we reckon he’s got the most sensitive ears. He’ll be on the other side of the trainers’ tower, it’ll be packed with people; there’ll be a conversation on this side, but he’ll hear it and then he’ll have some comment. He’ll be writing away and he’ll make some comment. He’s not even looking.

  ‘I’ve seen him with two stopwatches going – two horses at different sides of the track that he’s actually timing. And you walk in the door and he’ll say, “Oh, that horse of yours that went past the gap, it was making a funny breathing noise.” So he’s observed a horse that’s nothing to do with him, but he’s passed on information and he’s still watching those [other] two things happen. He is a champion trainer. He is a champion.’

  Smerdon recalls a conversation he had with his younger colleague about travelling horses from Melbourne to Sydney. ‘They’d leave here Thursday night; they’d go to Sydney, do some light work Friday, race Saturday and be back here Sunday lunchtime. And I said, “Do you find that timeframe works?” He said, “Yeah, I tell my driver to stop halfway, park the truck up, go and have a cup of coffee and something to eat, give it 20 minutes. Because [the horses] won’t relax enough to urinate when they’re travelling – they’re sort of holding their balance and all that.” But he said, “You park it up and you’ll see the urine just running out of the truck.”