Moods

by Helen Thomas

  For a yearling making good money, though, she had her share of faults. ‘She was a bit offset in the knee, and a little bit back on one knee, and she was a big girl, and those sorts of things tend to worry you,’ Moody says. ‘But fillies tend to carry those problems. You know, I tend to back my own judgement, my own eye, and it’s been to my detriment at times. But in this case it worked wonderfully for me.’

  Those without an innate confidence in their ability to ‘read’ a horse would have let this filly go because of these issues. Moody was prepared to roll the dice. ‘She was a great-actioned filly, and the fact that I had to pay $210,000 for her when the Bel Esprits were probably averaging $30,000 at the time, $40,000 maybe, tells you that,’ he says.

  Despite her worrisome knees, Moody’s stable didn’t treat the new filly any differently to the other yearlings through the initial stages of her racing career. Broken in by old friend Brett Cavanough, she had her first trial at Cranbourne Racecourse, about an hour south-east of Melbourne. Again, Peter Moody can remember it with pristine clarity.

  ‘Oh, I was a bit gobsmacked,’ he laughs. ‘I thought she was alright, but what she did that day – I thought, “Holy shit!” She won her trial, but it was just the manner and the way she did it. It was so effortless, and like she did in her races, she didn’t look to be going as fast as she actually was.

  ‘I think it comes down to the length of her stride. She looks like she’s actually going slow, which she probably is, but she’s got this mammoth stride and the other bastards are going, you know, hell for leather to try and keep up with her.’

  Moody’s foreman at the time, Tony Haydon, was also taken aback by that awesome stride. ‘I remember one morning Moods was away – I don’t know where he was – but one Saturday morning I was clocking horses, and say I clocked Typhoon Tracy, Reward For Effort, Avenue, Headway, Tickets and Wanted, and then Nelly came out and made them look second-rate,’ he says, using Black Caviar’s stable name. ‘You’d be watching her in the glasses, and you look back at the clock and think, “I must have done this wrong – somewhere along the line I must have this wrong.” And it was just her. She made them all look second-rate, and they were all good horses in their own right. She was just … different.’

  *

  Peter Moody admits Black Caviar’s problematic knees took a pounding, through training and racing. ‘When she got up and running, she did require a bit more management, because of her physical bulk,’ he says. ‘The concussion, probably the pressure and weight she put on her legs and her feet. She was a big, heavy girl and, you know, she took a lot of time and a lot of management. But I saw other horses that required the same time and management too. They just didn’t have the ability.’

  Of course, Moody had an equine magician to help keep the flying filly intact: chiropractor Mick Bryant. He first saw Nelly as a late yearling, when she came to his farm to spell. Not quite two, the youngster quickly made an impression on him.

  ‘The thing that I remember about her was that she just wanted everyone’s food,’ Bryant says. ‘We’d put her in a paddock with three other fillies and she’d have a mouthful of her own and then she’d run to next-door’s feed bin and chase that filly away and grab a mouthful of hers. Then she’d hunt the next one away and so forth, until she’d done the rounds and come back to her own bin, and then she’d go through that process again. She just loved to eat – that was her thing.’

  As big as Nelly was, the ‘muscle man’ says she was always athletic. ‘Certainly when she grew into her body as she got older, she may not have been the prettiest horse around, but she was extremely athletic for her size,’ he says. And her action was always fluid. ‘The ones that are non-athletic have shorter legs and are wide through the girth, but she had the longer legs and she had everything in the right place. If she was a person, she would probably be similar to one of the Williams sisters, the tennis players – big, strong, athletic.’ Extremely powerful.

  Like her stablemate Typhoon Tracy, Nelly also had an easy demeanour, although she was not quite as gentle a soul. ‘She had a great temperament,’ Bryant says. ‘She had no frills, no fuss. She was basically, “Come and do whatever you have to do to me and then leave me alone, because I want to eat and rest.” That was her thing. She didn’t necessarily need to be patted and cuddled. “Just do what you have to do and pop out and let me be a horse.”’

  But even before Nelly made her race debut, she injured herself. ‘Early days, she tore a muscle [in her chest],’ Mick Bryant remembers. ‘So even back from then she was a bit muscle-prone. And those niggling muscle injuries would haunt her all the way through her career.’ The chiropractor puts this down to her size, and her speed. ‘She normally did everything fairly quickly. If she wanted to run from A to B, she’d go quick in the paddock. And she could. So I think the fact that she did everything at a faster pace than most left her a bit more susceptible to muscle tears. She often had muscle tears when she raced. She would pull up a bit niggly here and a bit niggly there, but every now and then she tore a muscle and it would be quite big and she would be lame for one or two weeks. But she repaired quickly on most occasions, because she was always well and healthy – and being a good eater, that also helps them to repair a lot quicker.’

  As Bryant considers Black Caviar’s unbeaten record – 25 starts for 25 wins – he also recalls some of her more serious injuries. ‘There are a couple of times there she tore a muscle, and I think one was after about her third start. She slipped coming out of the barriers. She was lame for about a month after that torn muscle. But she still won. And that’s the other thing: I’ve never seen a horse in my whole life tear a muscle in a race and win … One of her biggest attributes was her pain threshold. I’ve never seen a horse tear a muscle and win, but she did. Done it on several occasions, three or four times.’

  For Moody, physically managing his marvellous sprinter became a prime focus – as well as running Moody Racing at Caulfield. He also had to learn to juggle the increasing publicity around his popular heroine, and the daily pressure that accompanied it. At its height was the trip to Royal Ascot in 2012, to race before Queen Elizabeth in the Group 1 Diamond Jubilee Stakes.

  By that time internationally acclaimed as the world’s best sprinter, Black Caviar had become a global sensation – a race horse with a brand name, a website, even her own Twitter account. The trip to the United Kingdom was to be the finest gem in her already sparkling crown. Of course, the racing gods refused to make it easy.

  ‘She was in pain,’ Michael Bryant says simply. He kept a diary on this trip, travelling with the mare. But he hardly needs to refer to it as he recounts what unfolded. ‘She was in pain the Tuesday before the [race on] Saturday. She’d done a bit of [track]work and she re-tweaked an old suspensory injury. So basically, all we could do was ice it and just wait a couple of days and assess it, and see how it was the day before the race.’

  The injury was in her offside fore, or front right leg. ‘Pete said, “Just put it in ice every day.” We put it in ice. Tony did it three or four times a day. And she also re-tweaked her nearside quad, that she’d done at her previous start in Adelaide. She re-tweaked that on the same morning she tweaked that suspensory. So she had cold laser therapy twice a day on that muscle.’

  As if these ailments weren’t worrying enough, according to the chiropractor the mare had swelling in her off front joint associated with the suspensory. ‘Basically, Pete said, “Just keep this to ourselves – we don’t need for all the owners to worry for something that might not happen.”’ The team also kept it from Black Caviar’s celebrated jockey, Luke Nolen. ‘So [on] Friday morning we had a look at it and Pete said, “What do you think?” I said, “Well, we’ve got an issue there – it’s a matter of whether she can carry that issue.” And Pete said – and I think it’s the best call he’s ever made – “I think she can carry that issue and still win. Let’s go and have breakfast.”’

  It must have been a meal of relief. While they were conc
erned about their horse, of course, the race itself – and Black Caviar’s presence at Royal Ascot, before Queen Elizabeth in her Diamond Jubilee year – had become a publicity and media circus of gargantuan proportion. And at the heart of this spectacle was Nelly’s trainer.

  ‘It seemed like half of Australia was there to watch her perform,’ Mick Bryant remembers. ‘His phone went crazy all day, every day, from people all over the world. Media, wellwishers … the pressure on Pete was just enormous, and I could tell, because we had an injured horse and we were 10,000 kilometres from home with half the country over there to see us …

  ‘We never slept a day of that week. From Tuesday, none of us had any sleep, because we knew we had a real problem there. So for Pete to call it like that was probably, for me, the best call of his career.’

  Bryant also considers that Black Caviar’s win at Ascot was the best of her career. ‘She was lame going into the race on one leg, and lame coming out of the race on two legs,’ he says. ‘She really aggravated that “back end” issue. Pete had enough confidence and faith in that horse to run through the pain threshold and win, and even though she just won, it was the best win for sure.’

  It came at a price – for all involved. Black Caviar herself, although she emerged victorious for the 22nd time and kept her unbeaten record intact, had sustained a career-threatening injury. Luke Nolen copped it in a different way, being widely criticised for not riding her harder to the line in the last, desperate strides of the race; essentially he was hammered for being kind to the grand mare as she tired beneath him.

  Years later, the jockey still becomes emotional when discussing the experience. He runs his hands through his hair as he describes what happened, occasionally pulling at it in what is still considerable frustration. But he has never regretted how he handled Black Caviar that afternoon.

  Nolen knew she was giving him everything she had, even though she was hurting more than he realised. He expected her to ‘float’ at the end of the race, like she usually did. Almost literally within the shadow of the finishing post, he realised another runner – Moonlight Cloud – had gained on them dangerously, and shifted his position in the saddle, pushing on the reins to urge the mare to stretch out her head on the line. Somehow, she did.

  ‘I nursed her and nursed her,’ he says, ‘and I just thought, “She’s out – I’ll coast.” I probably forgot I was at Ascot, because it is a bit of a run uphill, that last bit. And when I stopped [riding her out], because she was probably in as much pain as she was, she actually stopped on me. Normally, she’ll float through the line. You’ve only got to look at every other time I rode her, I’d rode her [in] the same manner. I push and go into managing and just let her shut the engine down, just let her float along. But we got away with it. That’s it. We got away with it.’

  Nolen understands why the trainer did not tell him about the extent of her issues going into the Diamond Jubilee. ‘It’s probably a stroke of his genius,’ he says. ‘I probably would have got her scratched, because it would have been weighing on my mind. She was not at her best. Pete backed her to overcome her little issues.’

  He looks away as he recalls that day, in front of the Queen and a crowd of 80,000, refocusing on not just the race, dramatic as it turned out to be, but on what he was thinking on the way to the barriers.

  ‘She started rough going down [in her legs],’ he recalls. ‘But I thought she was okay. By the time we got to the gates, she’d warmed up okay – I was hoping enough. She wasn’t at her best. But she’d been halfway round the world [to get there]. But in hindsight, I probably would have got her scratched; in hindsight, I probably would have kept her going to the line.

  ‘But I tell you what: if I had done that, they would have potted her and not me, because we wouldn’t have won by much further. But for her to do what she did was just unbelievable, because Midnight Cloud – the horse that ran second – came out and won four Group 1 races straight after the fact. And we beat her on three legs. I mean, that says something.’

  As Luke Nolen says, so does hindsight. ‘If we didn’t give her that gallop on Tuesday and we just went into that race without one, if she had reproduced that gallop they wouldn’t have seen which way she went. She had one gallop in her and, unfortunately, there were about 15 people watching it on the private gallop track at Newmarket. But it is what it is. In the record books, she still comes up “winner”.’

  The jockey misses Black Caviar, but not the hoopla that had engulfed her and the training team by the end of her career. It almost swallowed them whole. ‘I miss the camaraderie and the time we spent on her,’ he says. ‘I don’t miss the rest. I’m not a recluse, but if I’ve got nothing to say, I don’t really talk. I watch and I read, but if I don’t have anything to say, I won’t, and she dragged me into it a bit, and so did Typhoon Tracy. But it was a burden well worth my while.’

  Nolen admires the way Peter Moody handled the mare’s career, on and off the track. ‘Pete, the whole way through, was very forthright and he was an ambassador for racing, and a good one too. She couldn’t talk and I was more stand-offish than Pete, so he was the one that probably had to face most of the brunt. I still did my bit, but Pete did a lot.’

  Yet the rider admits that from Black Caviar’s 18th victory, he was looking forward to getting off the roller-coaster. ‘It was just due to the fact that it was the unbeaten run,’ he says. ‘It always built and built and built. I enjoyed the ride very much. But just the fact that the pressure continued to build … I was happy to see the day she retired, and with her record intact, because anything can go wrong in a race.

  ‘Usually with a good horse – not so much with an ordinary horse, or a fair horse – what can go wrong in a race usually does. Particularly with a mare, you can have off days. They can just have bad days.’ Not this mare. ‘She turned up at the races and she had 25 good days. And that was even [including] that day in England.’

  That afternoon at Royal Ascot, Queen Elizabeth came down to the mounting yard to meet Black Caviar and her trainer after the race. The series of photographs capturing that moment hint at how spent the mare was. Her head is not held as high as usual, as Her Majesty gently touches her nose. The Queen’s expression is one of delight, Nelly’s one of weariness.

  The next morning, just how taxing the Diamond Jubilee win had been became clear to Peter Moody and his team. ‘We scanned that issue and she had a hole in that suspensory,’ Michael Bryant says. ‘A lot of horses are retired after they do that. Never race again. We weren’t sure that it had a hole in it before the race, but she certainly had pain in it. She had a few other things go wrong with her over there. She had an injection about ten days [before the race], which just turned her coat ordinary. She had a reaction to it … and she didn’t eat the whole day. For her not to eat for one day is a big thing. She just had a lot of little things go wrong and she didn’t look 100 per cent over there. But she still got the job done, which just showed how good a horse she was. Any less a horse, that would never have happened.’

  With a different team, too, the mare might not have made it as far as Ascot, let alone crossed the line in front that day. As brilliant as she was, given her physical make-up, another trainer might have chosen not to persevere; they might not have known how to nurture her ability to push through her pain barrier time and again. They might not have wanted to. This trainer knew the mare so well that he persisted.

  *

  It is no coincidence that the team that accompanied Black Caviar to Ascot comprised Moody’s most trusted colleagues – not just Mick Bryant, Tony Haydon and Luke Nolen, but Brett Cavanough too. A successful trainer in his own right in Albury, with stables poised on the New South Wales and Victorian border, the man who had coaxed Moody to his first job in Sydney was also at Ascot to help get the job done.

  Cavanough remembers the fun they had but also the pressure. One afternoon, only he and his old friend were watching over the mare at their temporary home at Newmarket, in Suffolk, and were
forced to handle an unexpected crisis. ‘I was having a sleep,’ he recalls. ‘He said, “I’ll go and give her a walk and a pick [of grass].” But the vets had been to her that morning, and basically they fucked the bandages up on her. They didn’t put cotton wool under these elastic bandages, and she had cellulitis from the top of her hoof to her knee.

  ‘Next minute, he comes thumping up the stairs like a baby elephant, screaming out, “Get some ice, get some buckets!” I was the only one who had any cash – I’d won £24,000 on the punt the first day we were there. Anyway, we went into stress mode, and I think it was at that point in time that he put her on high security. So he basically shut everyone down [who] he didn’t want to see what the problem was. And we got over that.’

  The way the pair managed their stress levels on the day of the race itself was also typical of two men who would never let go of their bush origins. ‘We got in the car and we were heading downtown [to London], and we were actually drinking beer on the way down. We had quite a few beers on the way to her race. And we got to the fork in the road … And I said, “Come on, let’s [just] go – who cares about Black Caviar?” as a joke.

  ‘And he said, “Yeah, let’s go party – we’ll go into London.” And the driver said, “What are we doing? I’ve got to turn here.” Mick [Bryant] was in the back seat, and he went into stress mode. He said, “Are you blokes serious?” We said, “Yeah, Tony can saddle her up – she’ll still win, it won’t matter.” Anyway, we went to the races, and we had a few beers on the way, and a few when we got there.’

  Beneath this larrikin facade, Cavanough cares deeply about the great mare he had broken in, and his dry humour can’t hide the fact he takes enormous pride in having saddled her up that afternoon at Royal Ascot. ‘It was the first time I’d ever had any contact with her since she left my stable as a baby,’ he says. ‘She was a bit of a tart to saddle up. So Pete had the saddle and I went alongside of him, and it was the quickest saddle-up she’d ever had. I just handed him the gear – bang, bang, bang – and he threw it on her.