Moods

by Helen Thomas

  Now training a small string of horses at Townsville, Haydon also runs a ‘little courier truck’ business. He says he and his old mentor still talk, and he believes he understands better than most what makes Peter Moody effective.

  ‘He’s a hard worker and he’s just a good bloke,’ Haydon says. ‘At the end of the day, that’s what it boils down to. He’s got his things in place, where a horse should be, and he gets a good guide off that. And he’s got a good eye for a horse. He’ll see things that you don’t see. I’m not saying that he’s perfect. But to me, in my world, he’s perfect.’

  Filling Tony Haydon’s shoes as foreman (or assistant trainer) would not be easy, but Stephanie Little took on the role at the start of 2014. Lidari, a.k.a. Frankie, was just one of a number of high-profile horses she would oversee. In early January 2015 the stable was again caught up in a media storm – this time over Lidari’s cobalt charges. More than a year later, it still had not run its course.

  17

  IN THE END, the long summer of 2015–16 was the trainer’s cobalt season. And it did for him.

  While waiting for the RAD Board hearing to resume in mid-February, Peter Moody went to the yearling sales on the Gold Coast, and even bought some young horses. But his heart didn’t seem to be in it. With his business in jeopardy, and his good standing already shaken by the charges laid against him – not to mention the cross-examination he had endured – his revered ‘expert eye’ for a yearling was probably not quite as keen.

  The pressure he was under was certainly extreme. Racing insiders had been perplexed by Moody’s confessed lack of awareness about cobalt, and the seemingly haphazard way his stable’s feeding regime had been managed in 2014. It was quite possible, some reasoned, that the trainer really had had enough of it all by the time Black Caviar retired. The early mornings, the relentless seven-day-a-week racing schedule, the second stable in Sydney, the rising costs of the business, the interstate travel, the constant demands of owners and, of course, the wellbeing of the horses … Maybe it was just impossible to keep being so hands-on for so long.

  There was also the loss of Tony Haydon, the trainer’s long-time right-hand man. Could this have weakened the stable’s chain of command, and led to Lidari inadvertently being given, according to Moody, an increased amount of Availa for more than 80 days?

  Matt Martin certainly suspects this might be the case. He started work for the trainer as an apprentice farrier in 2004, when he was 16, and took over the main job four years later. He worked hard on the 80 horses Moody had in the yard at the time, grateful that the trainer had given him a go.

  ‘I started there at six [a.m.] and [would] always go to his main barn first and look at his work sheets,’ Martin explains. ‘It was so easy to work for him, because you never had to really communicate with him – everything was on his work sheet. So you knew when a horse was running, you got emailed runner sheets … It was just so professional.’

  But the farrier believes things changed at the end of 2013 with the departure of Haydon. ‘Tony did a lot in that stable that Moods didn’t know he did, and the feed-man didn’t know he did and the [new] foreman didn’t know that he did,’ Martin says. ‘If Tony [had been] there, the horse wouldn’t have been given double doses, because Tony looked over everything. So when Tony Haydon’s left, Moody didn’t realise that Tony had such a big involvement in it, and when the new foreman came in, they didn’t [realise] what he was actually doing … all the little things like that. I think losing Tony Haydon was the biggest loss for that stable.’

  It is an interesting perspective, and equine chiropractor Michael Bryant gives it some credence. ‘Yeah, that’s probably true to say, to a point,’ he agrees. ‘I suppose things are never the same once someone leaves … Tony and Pete used to bounce ideas off each other, and they spent a lot of time together, and they’d run things past each other. But he’s done that with Steph [Little] as well. He puts people in charge and gives them responsibility – “That’s your department, you fix that up” sort of thing. So whatever’s happened, it’s got lost somewhere. But we’ll never know for sure, will we, exactly what happened.’

  *

  By the time Jeff Gleeson and Matthew Stirling and their legal teams returned to the hearing room at Racing Victoria’s headquarters in Flemington, ready to put their final arguments to the RAD Board, the proceedings had a surreal air. Sixteen months had passed since Lidari was runner-up in the 2014 Turnbull Stakes at the racetrack just minutes down the road. But his positive swab was still being debated, and his hooves were still at the heart of this long conversation. Nor was the matter likely to come to an end in just a couple of days, as both sides had much to say in their closing statements.

  And there was an added twist in this tale – a significant one. The trainer’s counsel revealed that one of Racing Victoria’s key experts had changed his analysis about the effect Availa might have had on Lidari’s cobalt levels. The RAD Board learned that Dr Stuart Paine, the University of Nottingham associate professor of veterinary pharmacology – who had originally projected a one-in-10,000 chance that Lidari’s high cobalt levels could have been caused by Availa – had apparently struggled with a software problem while calculating the data.

  Paine’s new assessment was that if Lidari had been given the amount of hoof powder the stable claimed, the median level of cobalt in his system would have been 505 micrograms per litre of urine on Turnbull Stakes day – almost 100 micrograms higher than the 410 micrograms found in the horse’s B-sample, tested in Hong Kong. This was an extraordinary change in the expert’s view, but it did not impress the stewards’ QC.

  Jeff Gleeson was relying on one main argument to convince the board of his case. In a nutshell, he argued, Peter Moody’s attempt to blame the young stallion’s illegally high cobalt level on unusually high amounts of Availa in his system simply could not be believed. It was a ‘nonsense’ story, he said, and had unravelled.

  ‘There have been three versions put forward, and each of them implausible,’ Gleeson stated. ‘There are so many inconsistencies in the Availa story … Evidence was taken from Neil Alexander and Rami Myala that both had fed the legally available hoof powder to Lidari, with differing responses to [the] quantity of administration after the charges had been laid. [Moody] is lying to protect himself and has concocted a story. The problem with the defence is that the lies at the edges of the central lie has caused the unravelling …

  ‘The inconsistencies and absurdities are so many in number, this nonsense Availa story can’t be a mistake. It must be a lie, [and] if it is a lie, Moody must be central to the lie – and if it is a lie, the only reasonable inference is [that] the lie is an attempt to explain Lidari’s 410 reading.’ Gleeson hammered this point repeatedly, insisting that ‘the central lie’ was revealed because no one at Moody Racing could keep the story straight.

  Nor, he claimed, had the trainer reacted in a manner consistent with his claim that he had been ‘perplexed’ by the high cobalt reading. ‘What do you do if you’re a trainer with a lot of money invested in your operation … and you have this high reading of cobalt?’ the QC asked. ‘You turn the place upside down. Mr Moody’s no shrinking violet. He’s a forthright, robust, colourful character; he would have turned the place inside out. The only reason he didn’t was that he knows why Lidari had the high reading.’

  He reminded the board that they had heard that another horse in the stable, Brambles, had been given the same amount of the hoof powder, yet he had not returned an ‘over-the-threshold’ swab. ‘One of the most telling pieces of evidence in this case, and it’s completely insurmountable, is that Brambles was given the same amount of Availa in its feed – two scoops in the morning, one in the afternoon – if the evidence of Myala is to be believed. But Brambles’ reading was not in the three figures – Brambles returned a race-day result of 26 [micrograms]. That’s not reconcilable. You can’t get Brambles at 26 and Lidari at 410 if they are getting the same treatment.

  ‘T
here is no plausible explanation except for illicit administration of cobalt,’ the QC concluded. ‘If you can’t be satisfied of the Availa story, it is not a neutral outcome. If you don’t believe the Moody Availa story, it compels you to believe that he was involved in the administration of cobalt.’

  Gleeson was unimpressed, too, by the explanation of how Lidari’s daily feeds were organised. ‘It beggars belief,’ he said, ‘[that] we’ve got these wildly varying descriptions of what was given [to] the horse … You can’t muck it up! The whiteboard set out the details: “hoof powder, scoop PM”, written in the handwriting of the previous assistant trainer, Tony Haydon, years ago. You can’t really muck that up.’

  According to that whiteboard, the horses’ morning meal was a ‘dry mix’, while the one in the afternoon was a ‘wet mash mix’, in which the hoof powder could be well absorbed. The stable’s story about the mix-up, with extra supplement being added in the morning feed as well, was ‘the lie at the edge that eats into the middle’, the barrister insisted. ‘The centre of a lie is not so hard to hold on to; it’s the bits around it that are hard,’ he affirmed.

  ‘Lies are harder to sustain than most people think,’ Gleeson went on. ‘They unravel at the edges, and that’s what happened here; the hard part is answering questions [about them]. Those listening to Mr Moody shift and shape when giving evidence – and then Mr Alexander and Mr Myala – were left with one impression: this is not true. And it was, at times, excruciating … the Moody Availa story was months in the making, and days in the telling.’

  Jeff Gleeson had been cool, cutting and precise throughout this proceeding. But even he looked surprised, for an instant, when the board’s chairman asked him a question. If the so-called ‘Availa story’ falls away, Judge Bowman wanted to know, where would that leave the stewards’ case?

  The QC was quick to assure Bowman that ‘no vacuum exists’ if that were to happen. ‘You can say you just don’t know,’ he argued. ‘If you reject it, you’re not rejecting it in a way that renders the case neutral. It’s not necessary … that you are able to trace or identify the moment Lidari received the cobalt.’

  Gleeson reminded the three board members there was no CCTV footage of how Lidari received the cobalt, and while the vitamin injections raised questions, there was ‘no evidence led that’s how it happened’. As well, they must have a ‘comfortable satisfaction’ that Peter Moody was responsible for administering the drug. ‘We urge you to adopt an approach that bears in mind the overarching aims of these rules,’ he said. Obviously, that was to make racing a clean sport.

  *

  Matthew Stirling now had his opportunity to defend the trainer, and his opening parry was strong. ‘The essence of the stewards’ case against Peter Moody … is that the evidence of the Moody stable as to Lidari’s supplementation regime is not to be believed,’ he began, ‘and if that is so, Moody must have administered cobalt covertly to Lidari in addition to the disclosed stable supplementation regime, because otherwise the detected level would not have been reached.

  ‘A fundamental rule of law applies in this case: he who alleges must prove. Here, because of the serious charges of administration – coupled with the mandatory three-year disqualification – the RAD Board must reach a comfortable level of satisfaction of proof of the charges, including their individual elements.’

  In his final submission, Stirling indicated that his client’s defence relied on six key propositions, the most significant asserting that ‘all of the analysis evidence should be excluded for the reasons set out in the AR 178D arguments’. He also maintained that there had ‘been a shift in the stewards’ case’, which now involved them arguing that ‘the trainer and many of his witnesses conspired to mislead the board as to the stable’s supplementation regime’.

  Importantly, too, he insisted there was ‘no direct or contemporaneous evidence that Moody administered cobalt to Lidari’, and that ‘the witnesses for the trainer ought to be accepted in relation to feeding and the Availa dosages given to the horse’. The barrister argued that much of the evidence before the board supported the trainer’s innocence, especially the fact that his horses had been swabbed so frequently throughout his career.

  Finally, Matthew Stirling reiterated that the stewards had not established the ‘specific purpose intent’, or the ‘general intent or knowledge of the administration of cobalt’, which was necessary for the matter to be proved under AR 175(h)(i) and (ii).

  The barrister retraced the chain of events that led to the charges being laid against his client, from the stewards’ first visit to Moody’s stable in January 2015. ‘In fact, Moody was driving home at the time and had to turn around and return to the stables,’ he pointed out. ‘Meanwhile, other witnesses were separated, at least to some extent, and spoken to at the stable premises.

  ‘A critical fact needs to be observed, as background context,’ he went on. ‘In all cases where cobalt has been administered by trainers who have contravened the rules, it has been administered by intravenous injection. Indeed, Dr Brian Stewart [Racing Victoria’s chief vet] was recorded in the press in January 2015 as saying that the only way in which an elevated cobalt level could be achieved was by intravenous injection.

  ‘For these reasons, it was not at all surprising that the heavy focus of the questioning by stewards in January 2015 was on whether or not Moody had implemented a vitamin injection program outside of normal parameters, and, if he had, what the ingredients of those injections were. Stewards would have to concede that they did not closely investigate the Availa supplementation regime [at that time]. They would also have to admit that Availa was not on their list of culprits for Lidari’s elevated cobalt level.’

  After these initial interviews by stewards, Matthew Stirling argued, there was no evidence that Peter Moody had given cobalt covertly to Lidari, or at all – so there was no reason for the trainer to worry that he might be charged with any offence. Moody ‘genuinely believed himself to be entirely innocent of any such charges, and considered that the likely outcome was a presentation charge. And nothing more serious.’

  Naturally, when he was charged on 10 July 2015, Moody realised the situation was much more serious, and had then started ‘a more vigorous search of plausible reasons as to what had happened’. This involved discussions with his senior staff, including Stephanie Little, Neil Alexander, Michael Bryant and Dr Peter Angus. ‘The inference to be drawn is that he was notified of Rami Myala’s role in relation to feeding Lidari prior to July 24, 2015,’ Stirling said. ‘Myala recalls giving both Lidari and Brambles two scoops in the morning and one in the afternoon. He was insistent about this evidence and did not waver from it.’

  For Stirling, the stewards had not established that the stable’s supplementation regime was ‘either concocted or that it was a recent invention, or “eleventh hour”. The simple position is that the supplementation regime was only thoroughly investigated after Moody was charged,’ he affirmed. The stewards’ final case was ‘fundamentally flawed, because there is no direct or contemporaneous evidence … of [Moody] having administered cobalt above his stated regime, having any interest in cobalt, or engaging veterinary staff who provide cobalt-based vitamin injections, or ever possessing cobalt as a substance.’

  The trainer’s counsel refocused the RAD Board’s attention on the evidence of Dr Paine, one of Racing Victoria’s expert witnesses, and on what he described as ‘critical events [that] occurred during the running of the case’. Not only had Paine ignored the fact that Lidari had been fed the hoof powder on the morning of the Turnbull Stakes, but he had also been forced to admit that a ‘bug’ in his computer software had affected his results.

  ‘The consequence of the removal of the bug was that his earlier opinion – to the effect that there was a one-in-10,000 chance of Lidari’s feeding regime recording the detected level of 380 [micrograms] – changed to there being a one-in-31 chance of the stable regime causing the detected level of 380 [micrograms]. If the October 4
, 2014 feed is factored in, and the bug removed, then Dr Paine opined that there is an 87 per cent probability that the Moody supplementation regime would have brought about Lidari’s detected level of 380 [micrograms].

  ‘Racing Victoria stewards have thus painted themselves into a corner of having to destroy the [credibility] of Moody’s witnesses. The factual evidence must be destroyed, because if it is accepted, Dr Paine’s evidence leads to the inevitable dismissal of the administration charges. In other words, if it is accepted that Myala fed Lidari five and a half days a week with dosages of two 30-milligram scoops in the morning and one 30-milligram scoop in the afternoon, then the administration charges fail because the expert opinion is now unanimous that the Availa regime has caused the detected levels – Dr Paine stating that it would be highly probable, Dr Van Eps stating that it could have happened.’

  Matthew Stirling added that, because of these ‘critical’ changes, ‘the case of the stewards has shifted around and been cobbled together somewhat in running; for that reason, there has been a lack of definition about the so-called conspiracy case, and it has not been squarely, or consistently, put to the Moody witnesses.’

  The barrister’s submission also maintained that the trainer had been a straightforward and responsive witness. ‘He was not a witness who reconstructed in giving evidence,’ he said. ‘If he was not sure whether he could recollect an event, he said so … Moody made an important observation in his evidence at one stage. He stated that, “If you asked me about what work the horse did that day, I could tell you.”

  ‘Peter Moody is a horse trainer first and foremost, not a man given to documents or the precise recollection of events long ago. Some latitude needs to be allowed to a horse trainer with a large operation, who runs stables across two states, who has approximately 350 horses on his books, with 95 horses stabled in Melbourne and another 24 at Randwick, and with another 1100 owners on his books. The RAD Board can confidently accept him as a direct and truthful witness.’