Moods

by Helen Thomas

  Still, he did see a future for himself in racing. ‘I’ve had a great career – racing’s been terrific to me. I think there’s an opportunity for it to be terrific to me again. I’ve always suggested that I’m not going to be a “lifer” when it comes to training, but [I] certainly want to go out on my own terms, not someone else’s – and that’s not what has happened here today.’

  Even so, he knew better than to try to reach his previous peak. ‘Oh, listen, I can never replicate what I went through,’ he acknowledged. ‘But I’ve certainly got the desire. I can’t wait for my next winner – hope it’s tomorrow!’ And his love of horses was as strong as ever. ‘That’s never changed. That’s why you do it – that’s why it’s the only thing I’ve ever done … It’s the only thing I’ve done since I was 10 years old. If I got disqualified, I’m unemployable – 46 years old, and don’t know how to do anything else. Suspension gives me the opportunity to still participate in the industry, but not as a licensed trainer.’

  With his characteristic good humour returning momentarily, the trainer refused to be drawn on what he and Terry Bailey had discussed in the empty hearing room. ‘Ah, who’s going to get home first to have a XXXX, both being Queenslanders,’ he quipped.

  It was a nod to what already seemed a bygone era.

  20

  IN THE END, whatever was said in the conversation between the trainer and the chief steward after the RAD Board concluded was not enough to pave the way for Moody Racing to put a caretaker trainer in place within that strict deadline.

  David Brideoake, a horseman based on the Mornington Peninsula, seemed the most likely candidate to take over the operation for six months. But now an undertow was building, in and around the stable. Several horses heading to the races that weekend in Peter Moody’s name did not return, sent to new trainers by owners unsure of what lay ahead. Their instincts proved correct: within 48 hours, Moody came to the view that a trainer-to-trainer transition was going to prove too onerous.

  More significantly, he realised he had reached a personal point of no return. It was time to walk away. ‘Once we beat the cheating charge, you know, I didn’t care. Didn’t care. So that told me it was time to give it up,’ he says weeks later, having just finished breakfast ahead of his fourth day inspecting yearlings at Sydney’s lucrative Easter Yearling Sale.

  Without doubt Australian thoroughbred breeding’s premier annual parade of ‘best-in-barn’ youngsters and cashed-up egos of prospective owners and sellers alike, the Easter auction is the place to be seen for the racing industry’s prominent players. But the trainer looks pensive as he gazes out over Coogee beach, cloaked grey in early-morning drizzle. Those in his small, trusted circle say he is doing well. But his ‘last stand’ is over and the media circus has packed up, so he is no longer trying to hide his disposition.

  Moody says he is looking at yearlings for other buyers, not himself. ‘Oh, I was happy not to come. But I was asked by a couple of people to come and do a little bit of work. And now I’m unemployed …’ He laughs, but there is no accompanying grin. ‘I had David [Brideoake] in mind, just to keep the business going. But when the officials were going to make us jump through hoops to do that … I just thought, “I don’t need [that].”’

  As ever, his decision to leave rather than sit out his suspension and return to Caulfield created headlines. Two days after the RAD Board issued his six-month suspension, Fairfax, News Ltd, Channel Seven and Racing.com were reporting that he was likely to quit, rather than wait out his time. Racing Victoria’s stewards were also reportedly considering appealing the board’s penalty decision, in order to push for a longer suspension. Two days later, the trainer confirmed he was walking away ‘for the foreseeable future’ from the job that had been his lifeblood.

  In a letter to his stable clients, Moody apologised for such a dramatic change in course. ‘It is with much regret and a heartfelt decision that I have to inform you that I am going to recant my suggestion on Friday of where I said I would be back in training in six months,’ he wrote. ‘After a lot of deliberation with my family and senior management staff, we didn’t feel it was going to be a viable or workable proposition to employ another trainer to take the stable for the 6-month period of my suspension.

  ‘RV worked with us at looking at putting it together, and it would have been possible. But I just felt it was going to be very hard to make it workable and do the best by yourselves as the clients and more importantly, by your horses.

  ‘On behalf of myself, my wife Sarah and my staff, we wish you every success in your future racing endeavours and we certainly won’t be lost to the industry. But unfortunately, it won’t be as a trainer. I will share the joys of racing with you as a part-owner in a lot of the horses that we do race with you, and hopefully we can have more success together.’

  A day after that, Peter Moody fronted yet another media gathering outside his Caulfield stables, in the same spot to which he had often brought Black Caviar to pose for the photographers in her heyday.

  Weeks passed, and after an ‘everything goes’ auction of stable gear (not including the good mare’s old rug), the trainer was trying to adapt to his new life. It wasn’t easy. ‘We’ve probably been setting ourselves [for it] for a while,’ he muses. ‘It’s probably akin to a death in the family, you know? If it happens suddenly, it’s probably hard, whereas if someone’s been battling cancer for years – and this is, it’s a cancer – it affects you in layers. You ultimately know it’s going to happen, and we probably set ourselves for that.’

  Even away from home, near the different arena of Australia’s premier yearling sale ring, Moody was finding it hard to shake his overwhelming frustration about the ‘cobalt affair’, although he would admit to a feeling of relief that he was no longer spending the family’s money on prospective young stars.

  ‘I’m not going to be putting my hand up spending my money – that’s a big relief. You know, every time I did yearling sales, when they’re a couple of million dollars … it was putting our farm or our house on the line. That’s the way we’ve propelled our business forward, doing things that way, and inevitably that’s how we ended up with probably 70 horses. Other people didn’t back my judgement as much as I did.

  ‘I bought every horse in a belief that it could do a job, and I had to buy them believing that. If I couldn’t sell them, I had to be happy with them myself; so there was a rhyme or reason I bought probably every horse, you know? Sometimes I’d think, “Why the bloody hell did I buy this?”’

  Unlike many buyers, the trainer still never wastes too long contemplating pedigree pages. ‘I’m a great [fan of] first impressions – something’s going to grab me straight away,’ he says. ‘I think it’s just the general presence, an overall presence … As soon as it steps out in front of you, then you start to dissect it; it’s got a nice head, good girth – how correct is its physical makeup? Listen, I can’t explain it. It’s something [that] sort of grabs you, that’ll pretty much grab you as soon as you see it, I think.’

  There’s something else he has never been able to explain: why he never had the backing of wealthy clients at these sales. ‘I never went to the yearling sales with big orders to buy; I always had to buy my own,’ he muses. ‘I’d see others find these people along the way [who would tip in] millions of dollars. Maybe I didn’t need them. Maybe I was too dominant. Maybe those types of people like to dominate things and maybe they looked at me and thought they couldn’t. I don’t know. But it served us well, because if anyone ever left our business, they couldn’t hurt us.’

  But he remains affronted by what he believes was the Lidari investigation’s general lack of understanding about how a stable works overall. Moody alleges that investigators failed to visit his stable specifically to witness how things operated on a daily basis. Board members, lawyers, stewards – ‘never once did those people ever come to my stables and have a look at my practices. Ever. Anyone, never, ever.’

  He remains frustrated, too, ab
out the hearing process. ‘It’s not a legal system; it’s a kangaroo court. I feel let down by their understanding of it all. Like the fact that they never once came and had a look at what we did, and how our practices worked, and to see how easy it could be for a simple mistake to [be made]. At the end of the day, we never said Availa caused this. Ever. We said it was the only possible, plausible explanation we can give you.

  ‘It was their experts that said, “Hang on, what you’re feeding it maybe could have [caused it].” Went from being a one-in-10,000 chance to an 87 per cent chance, you know? Then you’ve got them saying, “Oh, you changed your story.” Well, shit, if we had changed our story, we would have had all our ducks a bit more in a row than we did. At the end of the day, they wouldn’t accept the fact that I wasn’t worried about it, because I really wasn’t.

  ‘Basically, they said from day one the horses had to be injected with this stuff to cause it, so it wouldn’t have mattered if I was putting shovelfuls of anything down his throat; nothing was going to cause this except an injection of cobalt, and I knew I hadn’t done that.

  ‘I’ve got no doubt that I’ve got the time only on the back, I reckon, of the board trying to keep the stewards happy – and on the back of probably the board [being] led to thinking I was incompetent. But once again, there’s three men that wouldn’t know the runnings of a stable, either. They’d never been there at three-thirty in the morning, when it’s pissing rain and two degrees and you’re feeding 85 horses.’

  Nor, he repeats, had the stewards. ‘No, no. No one. The stewards, who are ultimately the investigators – they never came in and had a look at our practices. They were only going on what we presented at the board, which I will admit was very muddled. But it’s a muddled situation.’

  *

  The trainer is not the only person who feels dissatisfied with the RAD Board’s decision, and the long journey leading up to it. John Schreck, Australia’s most lauded racing official, believes the Lidari matter was unfair on the trainer.

  ‘That horse ran in a race in the [spring] of 2014, and the inquiries were concluded in the autumn of 2016. It’s just far too long, and it wasn’t fair to Mr Moody, or to the sport, or to anybody else,’ Schreck says. ‘Domestic tribunals should be handled quickly; with domestic tribunals, quick justice is good justice, and that philosophy failed Mr Moody badly. And so I feel for him that the thing went on as long as it did, irrespective of his guilt or innocence. The whole thing dragged on far too long, and I’m sorry to say I guess it could happen again.’

  Peter Moody’s penalty also disturbs him: had he been overseeing this case, The Sheriff would have argued for a hefty fine and to let him carry on. ‘The suspending of a race horse trainer means usually that they lose the stables, which they quite often lease from the race club,’ he points out. ‘The suspension of a trainer affects innocent people, such as owners who had nothing to do with Lidari. It affects the staff that might have been with Mr Moody, and/or other trainers that have been suspended, for years and years. It affects their superannuation, their work continuity and all sorts of other things that a lot of people don’t think about, and I have, because that was the way I was taught – and I’m not a fan of suspending race horse trainers.’

  Schreck is troubled by the impact the case has had on the Australian public’s perception of the racing industry, which is probably ambiguous at best. ‘The publicity that his case generated certainly impacted upon the perception of the sport, badly impacted upon the perception of the sport,’ he says. ‘Most people start off the day with the perception that racing is full of corruption and crooks. And then, it’s like in the movies, in the last reel along comes the white knight and saves everybody and the sport just carries on … In relation to the Moody case, of course, the people that sit on the sidelines would see all that and immediately think “drugs”. They immediately think performance-enhancing stuff – whereas, from what I can understand, the whole thing was to treat the horse’s foot. [Moody] was trying to do the right thing and, regrettably, what he was giving it contained a prohibited substance.’

  But even after decades of policing racing rules, nationally and internationally, the former chief steward does not share the non-racing public’s somewhat suspicious view of the racing industry. ‘The thing about it is not everybody in racing is a frigging crook,’ he says. ‘The poor bastards, a lot of them work bloody seven days a week, 365 days a year and they wouldn’t make as much money as you and they never get a day off. I just don’t think it’s fair.’

  *

  When the RAD Board suspended Peter Moody, the immediate focus afterwards centred on what he would do; little attention was given to the response of the stewards, who had reserved their right to appeal.

  No one would say so publicly, but some argued privately that the judgement itself was inconsistent, if not flawed. If the board did not accept the argument that Availa led to Lidari’s high cobalt reading, what had caused it? And if they didn’t know, how could the trainer be guilty of anything more than ‘presentation’? Then again, if Moody was guilty of the lesser administration charge, surely that was serious enough to warrant a period of disqualification?

  Terry Bailey and his team had been wrestling with the matter, overall, for a year and a half. Now, they finally let it go: they would not appeal the ruling or the penalty. Nevertheless, David Moodie – the chairman of Racing Victoria – is clipped in his responses when discussing the matter.

  ‘A bit difficult to quite say this,’ he says. ‘The judgement, I thought, was unusual, in so far as it didn’t get to the detail of what actually took place. You know, [Moody] was found to administer [cobalt], but the hoof powder argument was dismissed, so what did happen? It’s not really answered. I think it’s unfortunate that that was the judgement.’

  Moodie, who was one of Peter Moody’s most important owners well before taking on the chairman’s role at the racing authority, is adamant his chief steward Bailey was not out to get the trainer. ‘You’ve got two very strong-willed characters to start with – from Queensland,’ he notes. ‘I don’t believe Terry was ever out to get him. I think Terry does his job very well; he understands what his role is. I do think the industry is a better place, integrity-wise, for the efforts of Terry and his team. I think it’s highly likely there were practices going on that were far more widespread in the past than what they are now, and that can only be a good thing. Integrity is vital.’

  What, then, of the concern many racing insiders have felt, quietly, about the possible conflict of interest between the head of Racing Victoria and his Caulfield trainer – or even the perception of it? ‘Perception is everything, isn’t it?’ Moodie smiles. ‘So I can understand the perception, but did it ever bother me? No. I think, to Peter’s credit, and also in part mine, we never really spoke about those sorts of things. We were very, very careful through the whole cobalt saga not to discuss it. You know, he used to occasionally vent his spleen … He’d say to me, “You’re not doing anything about something,” and I’d say, “I’m not, and you know I can’t, and you know I won’t.”

  ‘Should I have had horses there, throughout all that? Of course I should have, because if I had withdrawn them, it would have, in part, been viewed as judgement; I would have been coming to a judgement before the appropriate authority … And I wasn’t prepared to do that.’

  David Moodie first sent a horse to Moody in 2009, when the trainer was a rising star. ‘I’m not sure he’d reached the top, but he was pretty obviously the next big thing,’ he says. ‘He’s a horseman. At that stage, he was hands-on and focused, and he wasn’t as big as what he became, and he was a bloody good trainer. I think as time went on and the whole thing escalated, and he had 300 or 400 horses on his books … his systems probably didn’t grow as they should have. He’s definitely the sort of bloke that is so hands-on, he needs to be over everything. He needs to know the wherewithal of every move that every horse and every person makes, and when you get to that level, sometimes you
can’t do that.’

  This history helps explain the frisson in the air at Moonee Valley on the evening of 24 March 2016, Peter Moody’s last outing as a major trainer. This was the night the Moodie/Moody combination took out the Group 1 William Reid Stakes. ‘It was an emotional night,’ Moodie recalls, ‘probably one of the most emotional days I’ve had at the races – the other two being the Caulfield Cup and the Golden Slipper. And, yeah, they were screwed-up emotions, that’s for sure.

  ‘[I] probably didn’t think that much about it at the time; when a horse wins a race like that, it’s always emotional. But to wake up the next morning and think, “Well, jeez, that’s sort of the end of it – that was his last day of training, the end of it for the moment” … It was quite surreal.’

  21

  WHAT BECAME STRIKINGLY clear within days of the trainer announcing his decision to move on was the immediate impact it would have on the lives of so many others working with and around him. He had given his staff as much warning as possible, putting them ‘on notice’ ahead of the RAD Board hearing in early December, in a bid to give them time to find other employment.

  ‘I believe I would be derelict towards them as an employer if I was not upfront about all possible outcomes,’ he said at the time. Racing Victoria then started broad discussions with the Australian Trainers’ Association over what assistance could be given to stable staff if trainers were disqualified on so-called ‘cobalt charges’.

  No one imagined what might happen to those who were working with Moody but weren’t part of his ‘official’ staff: his equine chiropractor, farrier, feed supplier, pre-trainer, even his vets. It did not take long for the fallout to become apparent.