Moods

by Helen Thomas

  Hit hard was Peter Moody’s oldest colleague and mate, the man who persuaded him all those years ago to jump on the bus in Charleville and head to Sydney to work with T.J. Smith. In Albury, Brett Cavanough had to sack 12 staff at his pre-training business – an operation worth $450,000 a year.

  ‘Everybody says the industry will soak them up. The industry will soak the horses up, but it won’t soak the people up,’ the man who broke in Black Caviar predicted. ‘It’s not pretty. If I was to continue on with the staff we had, it’s just a downhill slide. Peter has been with us for 12 years and we’ve watched him grow. It’s obviously been my core business; training horses has just been a hobby for me.’

  As well as being forced to lay people off, Cavanough also closed a 40-horse barn that he used to house the young horses he worked with for Moody Racing; they occupied 30 stalls ‘and he kept them full most of the time.

  ‘Our core business was breaking and pre-training for Peter Moody,’ he told the media. ‘We do it for a few others, but he was obviously a very big client. The flow-on effect of whether we can go forward, backward or hold our ground is something we will have to wait and see what happens.’

  On a smaller scale, Moody’s young farrier, Matt Martin, had the proverbial rug pulled from under him when the trainer closed his business. He worked for a handful of other trainers as well, but Moody Racing was his main employer. In fact, it was so busy, Martin had taken on an apprentice. ‘He finished his time with me,’ the farrier says. ‘I had a subcontractor as well that did one or two days a week.’ It’s not exaggerating the scenario to say that Martin had built his fledgling business around the Caulfield yard. ‘I relied on Moody so much, because … always by the end of the month, the money was there, you know? You could actually rely on his money being there, so you could make your house payments, you could pay wages – whereas the other trainers, you’ve really go to ride them to get paid. So without Moody now, that makes things a little difficult.’ He has had to put off both the former apprentice and the subcontractor.

  ‘I’ve been in the racing industry since I was a kid, and he’s the best thing that I’ve ever seen for the industry,’ Martin says. ‘And then for myself – I will never be able to replace him. He’s the biggest loss to me. Like I said, I’ve had to put off two people and go back to work by myself, and even then, I’ve just got enough work for myself.’

  The farrier now finds himself travelling further afield to get that work. His biggest racing stable has just 18 horses – a huge drop from Moody Racing’s peak of 120 – and this means that Matt Martin can no longer work exclusively on thoroughbreds. Now, he has ponies and riding horses to shoe and trim, and a lot of driving between jobs.

  Mick Bryant has made an even greater journey away from Caulfield. He and his wife have bought a house on Bribie Island, in Queensland. ‘I thought, “If the worst comes to the worst, where do I want to be?” and I really wanted to be in Queensland if Peter wasn’t [at Caulfield],’ he says. ‘So I bought a place up here last year. And then the worst came to the worst.

  ‘It had a massive ripple effect just on me alone – he was 30 or 40 per cent of my business. So it’s had a massive effect, [but] not just on me. I don’t care about me – I’m sort of at the end of it. But it’s affected a lot of people … and I think the stewards and all that don’t actually realise how many it does affect. I think the industry needs to look at that for future cases, because why should all those people that did nothing wrong – like Brett Cavanough – be penalised?’

  It is impossible to overstate Bryant’s role within Peter Moody’s world. He was an integral part of the trainer’s operation for decades, and he was the one who first used Availa on stable favourite Hanks. He also introduced key players into the mix, Lee Evison being one of the most recent.

  The standardbred trainer and all-round horse ‘fixer’ – of bowed tendons, strained suspensory ligaments, hoof problems, even bleeding attacks – was asked by the chiropractor to step in when no one else could get Brambles right. ‘I got him and I think he was back at the races in about four months’ time,’ Evison says. ‘It’s a long process and it’s really hard for me to describe, but I guess the shorts of it are 80 per cent of what we do is controlled exercise and 20 per cent medication. So by the time Brambles went back to Peter Moody, he might’ve done 1000 kilometres of work on my track. It’s all controlled – they start doing very low kilometre-like exercise and eventually build up to doing 20 kilometres a day – and they’ll do that week after week after week, to the point where it gets their legs so strong and the fibre alignment in their tendons … so strong they can withstand racing. It’s not stressful for them.’

  Evison is not yet sure how hard his relatively new business will be affected, now that Peter Moody is no longer a client. But he describes the short-term impact as huge. ‘We’ve got 10 staff here and we had to lay two of them off, soon as he left,’ he says. ‘We’ve had to scale down. We probably haven’t had the full brunt of it yet, because we still actually have a few of his horses still here, mainly because they won’t leave until they’re fixed and then they’ll go on to other trainers. But obviously, when they’re all gone and I don’t have that supply of his horses …

  ‘His horses left, and the next day you look around and we’ve got empty stables, something that no trainer wants to see. I guess I was lucky, because we don’t just rely on one person. But when he is your biggest client … Yeah, it certainly was a very stressful time for me personally, even though I was only a link in his chain.’

  Lee Evison is honest, too, about his personal reaction to the cobalt saga. ‘We had a very good system, a very trusting system, and a system that actually worked and got their horses back racing and winning, and now I feel like a part of me’s lost as well, you know? I sort of lost on that, and obviously not having that in my business anymore is just a hole that can’t be filled.’

  *

  Harder to quantify is the impact the matter has had on Moody Racing’s senior vet, Peter Angus. Shaken by Jeff Gleeson’s grilling before the RAD Board, he says he now appreciates how people get confused when they are in the witness box in a court of law. ‘It’s very hard to remember specific things that happened months ago, even weeks ago at times, when you’re not thoroughly prepared for it,’ says the equine specialist, who has known Peter Moody since he was Bill Mitchell’s foreman. ‘The line of questioning and the tone of the questioning, it can unravel you.’

  Angus was with Moody when the trainer moved to Victoria and started his own stable at Caulfield, and he accompanied Black Caviar on the plane to the United Kingdom, ahead of her one race at Royal Ascot. ‘That animal’s opened up so many doors for so many people,’ he says, ‘and I was privileged to be part of it. It was an amazing ride. But just dealing with Pete the whole way through – he’s just been a great guy to work with. Once he trusts you, he’ll listen to whatever you have to say.

  ‘It’s certainly accelerated my learning, and my ability to work with absolute top-end, elite race horses and to learn some of the things you do [to] make for better race horses, better than the rest. Black Caviar was a fine example of that. She had a high pain threshold – the better horses just have that extra something about them. And without working in that stable, I’m not sure that I would have been where I am today with my level of knowledge.’

  Angus was demoralised by what happened at the hearing. ‘I pride myself on doing the right job, and I’ve certainly never, ever looked at breaking the rules, or doing something that could potentially cause a problem. I mean, obviously we work with rules, we push the boundaries to a degree. But that’s what you need to do at the top end of the game; certainly we never, ever tried to work outside those boundaries.’

  He feels the picture that was painted – ‘you know, when we walked into the stable, we’re just given a syringe and we just inject it into the horse without ever knowing what was in it’ – ignored the process that had been in place for 15 years: horses would get a vit
amin shot two days out from a race and it was often made up in the stable. ‘Sometimes we’d make it up, but sometimes it would be made up for us, just from a time point of view,’ the vet says. ‘It was a very regimented thing. However, it was trying to make it out that we were just injecting anything that was given us, which is far from the truth.’

  Peter Angus also lost his best client. ‘That has had an effect on my business,’ he says. ‘I’m nowhere near as busy as I was a couple of months ago, and I know a lot of horses have gone to other trainers that we deal with. But it’s not quite the same. Seriously, not for me, anyway. Personally, yeah, things [are not] quite right. Ten years I worked in that stable, and I took pride in it being the stable I looked after … So yeah, I do miss it. I do miss it.’

  *

  Terry Henderson, at the heart of this sprawling chronicle since buying Lidari back in 2012, has a sharper reading than most of what occurred before and after that race. He believes Moody’s suspension ‘was probably appropriate because they couldn’t connect Peter to the direct supply of cobalt in relation to the horses.

  ‘But what the evidence did tell us was that Peter’s processes were far from satisfactory for what you’d expect from a top-quality, professional trainer. There were a lot of inadequacies. I’d thought for quite some time that the operation was not the most efficient one that I’ve seen. What surprised me was the lack of process, the lack of proper protocols, that was made evident in the evidence, and indeed, the level of … what would you call it … omission from what should be required where you’ve got a stable with probably $30 million or $40 million worth of horses, with 60 or 70 employees. That did surprise me.

  ‘The three key principles in business are “Do it, dump it or delegate”. Peter was a doer – he wasn’t a delegator. We saw direct evidence of this [several] years ago, when he realised that his stable was too big and he couldn’t manage it, and he downsized quite considerably, and as a result of that downsizing the stable performed better: the strike rate goes up. Horses like Typhoon Tracy, Black Caviar, Manighar came along, and he probably had more Group 1 winners in those times. But when he had a stable three times the size, I think he realised he just wasn’t able to handle it.

  ‘For whatever reason, he let it grow out of control again. And we all know the reasons: it’s very hard to knock back people, especially existing clients, and as a result it grew to what it was previously. He had stables in Sydney and, at one stage, in Brisbane as well. And, not being a natural delegator, there’s no doubt he tried to do everything and it just got completely out of control.’

  Terry Henderson also maintains that the Lidari case has highlighted a critical factor in Australian racing: the lack of professional business training that race horse trainers have. Like so many caught up in this case, this influential businessman – who won the iconic Caulfield Cup/Melbourne Cup double in 1995 with New Zealand–bred stayer Doriemus – does not beat around the bush. While he hates seeing Moody leave the industry, he says his situation typifies what is wrong nationally when it comes to training race horses on a professional scale.

  ‘Peter Moody is classically a trainer that’s experienced the problems that we’ve got generally throughout Australian training ranks,’ Henderson says, ‘and that is a lack of training that the trainers themselves have. You know, we can have a guy in Australia who is a stablehand today, but in 12 months’ time he’s training 50 horses in two states, he employs 20 staff and the value of the horses is $10 million. Literally.

  ‘Being responsible for all that resource, he’s undergone not one ounce of [formal] training. He’s undergone no process whatsoever, and yet he’s got the ability to go out and actually do it. There’s no other profession I know – and training is a very complex profession – when someone can take those sorts of leaps in their operation without any skill set being required to do it. They have to pass a couple of rudimentary exams that you can do if you’ve had the most basic horse experience. It is so different from what we see in other parts of the world.’

  This key owner believes all Australian trainers should be required to study for the job, as they do in Europe. ‘I think we have a cultural issue in Australia that’s fundamentally centred around the lack of adequate training for trainers,’ he insists. ‘I think we’ve done a great job [here] training jockeys, and when you listen to our jockeys speak these days, they’re great; compared to 25 years ago, they go through a process that addresses a number of issues that help them develop their careers.

  ‘Trainers, the way we’re structured, have no formal process other than an exam, which is fundamentally all horse-based, and a little bit business-based. I’m speaking very generally, but as a result of that we’ve got a very unprofessional group of trainers generally. And if we compare it to overseas? Hugely different.

  ‘In Europe, you become a trainer after you’ve been an assistant to someone … it’s usually [for] two years. And in that time, they learn how to basically do all the things a trainer would do, and this process, which is supported by a two-tier exam process, is a regimented one that’s accepted. With all of that [comes] a culture, and if you look at the culture of Australia’s training – it’s horrific. Where are the professional ethics in the industry? Where is the code of conduct that any profession has? These guys are running multi-billion-dollar businesses off the back of ignorance, in many cases.’

  Training the trainers, then, has now become crucial. ‘You could set up a “master trainers’ association”, where you actually have a code of conduct,’ Terry Henderson says. ‘This is going to show that we’re serious about cleaning up the industry and improving the quality of the trainers we have. They have a similar thing in England that they call a Master Trainers Association. But it’s something that actually says to the public, “We are professionals, we do take these things seriously and we do conform to processes that are legal.”’

  As far as Peter Moody’s future is concerned, Henderson remains positive. Even if he does not return to training, he sees roles for him in the racing industry as a trainer’s mentor, as an after-dinner speaker, as a buyer of yearlings. ‘He’s a good raconteur, and Pete’s quite a well-read guy. So look, there are plenty of opportunities for him in racing and out of racing,’ the OTI Racing director says, while insisting that the best thing about the trainer is his skill as a horseman. ‘Peter is an extremely good horseman – he’s a really good guy. He has shown himself to be a real ambassador for the industry, who’s got the industry at heart in so many respects; none better typifies him than during the Black Caviar affair, where he was doing things for the industry that many other trainers would simply not do.

  ‘And so I hate, I hate to see this guy leave the industry.’

  22

  NO ONE COULD have blamed Peter Gordon Moody for making a quick and clean break from the industry that had brought him such joy, and then meted out such pain. Whether he deserved it or not, his work ethic through what must have felt like the longest year of his life could hardly have been faulted.

  He had long insisted he was not a ‘lifer’, but his leaving was far from the strategically planned exit that he had imagined, and probably even mapped out with wife and business partner Sarah. And the manner of it rankled. So, true to form, this irrepressible character refused to fade away, or lie down, or even take a real holiday. He went in a completely different direction: he hired a corporate manager and started building a career at the edge of the track. He could not train for the six-month suspension period, of course, but he could stay close to his life’s grand passion.

  Moody became a popular public speaker, and not just after dinner, appearing as a special guest at racing carnivals like Warrnambool’s annual four-day festival, and the Darwin Cup. He signed on to do an autobiography for a reported ‘six-figure’ sum, and became an ambassador for Ladbrokes, one of the world’s biggest online bookmakers.

  There was much speculation in racing circles about why he was taking on all this work. Could he not afford
to pass up such offers? He had made no secret about wanting to ‘keep the wolf from the door’, and claimed to have spent a good $500,000 on legal fees through the cobalt case. But did he really need so much money so quickly that he had to take on all these projects? And if he was going to train again, as most genuinely hoped he would, would not a role with a multinational betting shop compromise the perception of his independence, should he return to the training ranks?

  Moody had barely had six weeks off when the online bookmaker released details of its star catch on 29 April 2016, and he had continued his bloodstock work during that period. But even those few weeks of sleeping in must have felt like months of downtime to a man who, for most of his life, was always up long before even the hint of dawn.

  ‘As I’ve said all along, I need a job just like everyone else, and what Ladbrokes has in the pipeline moving forward is very exciting,’ Peter Moody was quoted as saying in the media statement the leviathan bookie released announcing his appointment. ‘It’s actually been quite a refreshing month or so, taking that step back. But I obviously still want to be involved in the racing industry and Ladbrokes was a really good fit.’

  The woman who knows Moody best sees just blue sky ahead, and a positive path. ‘What’s happened is mind-blowing, really,’ says Sarah Moody. ‘But we’re going to make the best of it, and I think it’s a blessing in disguise.’ She is sitting in their kitchen, looking out over the rolling paddocks of their Belgrave farm, home to her four showjumpers and 10 other horses spelling at the property.

  ‘Some of those are ours, or ones that we have shares in,’ she observes. ‘Obviously, moving forward we would like to not own many, because they cost us a fortune. We would have shares still in 70 or 80 that we need to move on, because we can’t afford [them] without a business. Ideally, we would have maybe a handful that we may race; I hope not to race any, but obviously we can’t just get rid of them all straight away.’