Life with Rosie

by Helen Thomas

  ‘It happens at least once every morning at track work, believe me. But as far as Rosie goes, it means she and her pal will have another go at it on Tuesday morning.’

  But the foreman is saving up the punch line: the senior jockey involved in this work is none other than Peter Mertens, Harry’s favourite rider.

  ‘He was on the Beckett gelding, while (our) young Irish apprentice was on Rosie and I suspect he may have known they weren’t going fast enough. But what’s he going to do? He can only follow the senior jockey in that situation. And to be fair to Pete, he rode two perfect gallops either side of Rosie’s,’ Robert says.

  ‘Then again, you know what they say about jockeys riding track work …’

  Actually, I don’t.

  ‘Some of them just aren’t any good at it, like some track riders don’t make the grade as jockeys at the races.’

  Working a horse in a prescribed manner, in other words, is a special skill, an art that can literally turn on an instant. Jockeys need an old-fashioned clock in their heads and while the best riders can time their runs perfectly in the hurly-burly of a race, track-work riders time their sectional splits to perfection in these often crucial early morning work outs.

  This is why veteran work riders like Joe Agresta, who has been with Bart Cummings’ stable at Flemington for 30 years, are so revered. And heaven help any jockey who goes too fast or too slow in the days leading into a major race. But no harm has been done with Rosie today. We just have to wait another few days to see how the filly goes when she is allowed to fly home fast for the first time.

  Life with horses being what it is, the next day brings some sad news. Deane Lester has to have his talented mare Kindrate euthanased after she fractured her pelvis in a paddock accident and then came down with colic.

  Deane bred and raised the mare and is understandably distressed that she endured this suffering, but couldn’t be saved. To make matters worse, this good race mare was in foal for the first time. How she came to injure herself at all remains a mystery, as no one on the farm saw her slip or rear back and fall, and can find no trace of mishap. But as Deane knows, it is no longer worth worrying about.

  ‘You just can’t try to work out how horses do things like this, or why they always seem to happen to good horses like Kindrate, because it will just do your head in. It will drive you crazy.’

  For Deane, losing Kindrate is just another one of the extraordinary lows of thoroughbreds. On top of this comes a new problem for us to wrangle. It’s not at all traumatic like the decision Deane has just been forced to make, but requires some thought.

  A couple of years ago, when One Love—the once small foal who was sold at the mixed summer sale in Sydney with her mum, Express—retired from the track due to a recurring injury to a hoof, a couple of her owners and I decided to stay with her as a broodmare, to keep her wonderful old family tree active. We also believed such a strong young mare should continue to work, albeit in a second career.

  After much discussion, we sent her to Rosie’s sire, King of Roses. Again, his impressive, if under-rated, pedigree tied in well with hers and just as importantly, we felt we had proof, up-and-running, of just how good his progeny could be.

  Once in foal, Mouse (as we call her at home) returned to Picayune for the duration of her pregnancy, again bringing into play a shared feeding roster. Diane took care of her through the week, while I took over on the weekends. The arrangement worked better than we ever imagined, with the once spirited race filly who took two handlers as well as a jockey to get her to track work each morning becoming the friendliest, most companiable mare on the farm. And when she gave birth to a russet-bay colt, giving Express a grandson and Harry a nephew, Mouse took to her new role with aplomb—and Bono, her son, is already developing into a youngster who just might run for his sire. It will also help the stallion if Rosie can make an impression on the track in the next few months, as any positive performance from one of his offspring can only underline his value as a sire. Despite his excellent family tree, and the fact that he won his first race by several lengths (beating a young Fields of Omagh, who went on to win no fewer than two Cox Plates), at this stage he needs all the help he can get to promote his newest yearlings.

  None of this matters to Robbie Griffiths, of course, nor should it. He is in no hurry to bustle Rosie along and can’t prevent the odd setbacks occurring—fortunately around her, not to her. On the morning she is re-scheduled to sprint home in fast time, her track work partner is found to be shin sore and will be spelled. So Rosie spends the morning working in the barriers with two other two-year-old fillies. If all goes according to plan, she can gallop with them on Saturday morning.

  But three days later, Blue Diamond Day for some of the fastest two year olds in the land, our trainer decides to gallop her on her own, to ensure all is right with her knee. Could it be an omen? Robert Kingston informs me that Robbie has been watching the filly’s knee like a hawk, just to double-check how it is faring and to make sure there is no risk of damage while she is under the pressure of a race.

  And erring on the side of caution, Robbie asks jockey Danny Adam to put Rosie through her paces alone, so he can get a proper assessment of her physical action during the gallop. An accomplished race rider, Danny is highly regarded as a horseman and rides track work regularly for the Griffiths team. If the small area of inflammation in Rosie’s knee is making her galloping action even the slightest bit scratchy, or out of kilter—let alone causing her to shorten stride—Danny will feel it.

  So the two head out over 600 metres and come home against the clock: 15 seconds for the first 200 metres, 13 for the second and 12.3 for the final furlong—in other words, a tick over the prescribed time of 12 seconds flat.

  ‘That’s what we wanted her to do and she did it well within herself, on the bit as usual,’ Robert says. ‘It was a shade over “evens” (12 seconds for the last furlong), but that was probably because Danny knew what the story was with her knee and didn’t push her out that last little bit.’

  Times aside, the jockey’s report back to the trainer about her action couldn’t be better: Rosie’s action is faultless.

  ‘That was the best thing about the work, Danny was very happy with her,’ Robert explains. ‘He said he couldn’t fault her action at all.’

  In a funny way, when I hear this, I feel more relieved for our trainer than anyone else, even Rosie, because it’s always going to be on his shoulders that Rosie’s future rests. Robbie is the one who has to keep making the decision to either steadily increase her both in distance and tempo, or put her back in the paddock for a break to ensure the condition of the knee doesn’t deteriorate.

  Given that she has already been in work a solid four or five weeks longer than originally expected now, the paddock must be beckoning.

  And Robbie has extra cause to be leery about keeping Rosie in work for too long. One of the most expensive two year olds in his stables—the $100,000 God’s Own filly he bought for private clients at the March sale last year—went lame after track work earlier in the week. X-rays revealed the bones in both her knees are soft, so she is on a course of the same bone-strengthening treatment that Rosie had a few months ago. Little wonder the trainer spends so much time looking at all his youngsters’ knees.

  ‘We’re going to push forward, but it’s one gallop at a time,’ the foreman says. ‘To be honest with you, if she’d only just come to us and we didn’t know anything about the knee, and had had no problems with it, Robbie would probably be pushing her to see how good she is. But the way Robbie’s talking, I think she’ll be in the paddock by the end of next week.’

  Later that day, Star Witness—a $150,000 purchase at last year’s Magic Millions Gold Coast sale—wins the $1 million Blue Diamond at Caulfield, coming from almost last and wobbling around the turn to overwhelm the leaders right on the winning post.

  In a thrilling display of raw ability, the colt made up five lengths in the last 200 metres to win the race and rema
ins unbeaten in three starts, winning $717,000 along the way.

  But, at this stage, he is not nominated for the $5 million Golden Slipper.

  To put the colt’s performance in terms of the pace work Rosie is doing, Star Witness ran the last 800 metres of the 1200 metre Blue Diamond in 46.07 seconds—the last 600 metres in 34.91, the next 400 metres in 22.99, and the final furlong in 11.55 seconds. In a Group One event like this, at the elite level of competition, this is what we are up against.

  And yet, Danny O’Brien didn’t nominate Star Witness for the Blue Diamond originally, because he had no reason to believe he would be good enough to even get close to making the field. This is yet another example of how young horses can surprise even expert horsemen. And why hope springs eternal!

  Starcraft, his internationally credentialled sire, never raced at such a young age and his dam, Leonne Chiarra—who O’Brien trained as a race mare—was also a late developer; indeed, no one in that equine family is an early comer. So there was no expect-ation at all that this flashy chestnut would do more than just have a start or two as a juvenile, before coming into his own in his third year.

  But if there’s one thing all these young horses and their connections have in common, it’s the simple fact that there is no way of knowing which two year olds will stand up to the rigours of racing and which won’t.

  No matter how much you pay for them as yearlings, no matter how big or how small they are, no matter what their pedigree page says, there’s no way of predicting young racehorses’ ability. Rosie is a perfect example of this.

  On Silver Slipper Saturday, one of the final qualifying races for the $3 million Golden Slipper, our filly goes back onto the track for another proper fast gallop. Robbie again asks senior jockey Danny Adam to take her out, instructing him to allow the filly to really quicken up over the last furlong. But this morning, her sectionals for the 600 metres break down to 15 seconds for the first 200 metres, 13 for the second and 13 for the all-important final 200. This is almost a second slower than her work last week, so something is obviously different. A warning bell sounds.

  ‘Danny knows her well enough now and he said when he asked her to quicken, she just didn’t feel right, she just felt a bit shuffley; not scratchy as such, or stumbling, just shuffley,’ Robert Kingston says when we have our post-work chat.

  ‘Danny said he couldn’t pinpoint anything really wrong with her action, because it wasn’t one leg or another, and he knows all about the knee, so he would have been aware of that. It was just her overall action wasn’t what it had been when he rode her last week, for instance. It just wasn’t quite right, so he didn’t ask her to quicken again that last furlong.

  ‘If an apprentice had ridden her, they probably would have, so that’s the reason Robbie had Danny ride her. He wasn’t taking any chances. But the knee didn’t look any different really before she went out, or when she came back and she certainly wasn’t sore at all.’

  Despite this, Rosie is heading for a break in the paddock. Robbie and his team aren’t prepared to risk forcing the issue with her knee if it is not quite right.

  ‘In a way, I think this is what Robbie’s been waiting for these past two weeks,’ Robert reflects. ‘She has been in work a while and this is what happens with two year olds. They find a way to tell you they’ve had enough.

  ‘Knowing this filly, I don’t think she will ever go off her feed, so this was her way of letting us know she wants a break. So she’ll go out to the paddock now for six to eight weeks and probably come back in for the colder months, which will be good for her anyway.’

  Before she goes anywhere, Rosie will be checked again to ensure her knee is fine.

  ‘Obviously, we will trot her up in the morning to make sure she’s OK before putting her on the truck, but she was fine after the gallop and I expect she’ll be fine in the morning. In a way, it would have been better for you all if she had managed to have a trial and we had been able to get some gauge of her ability before this happened. But a lot of young horses develop this way, I’m afraid. It’s just part of the process.’

  That afternoon, the best yearling story in years gets even better, when Chance Bye—the youngster battling trainer Michael Tubman had to borrow $15,000 to buy at the Sydney sales, a year ago—skips away to win the Silver Slipper, securing herself a start in the Golden Slipper, the world’s richest race for two year olds, in five weeks’ time.

  Now officially tagged ‘racing’s fairytale filly’, she beat her rivals fair and square in open competition today, by a margin of one-and-a-half lengths, and leading all the way with jockey Kathy O’Hara doing little more than steering.

  In another great part of this saga, O’Hara bought her own set of silks to wear when riding the filly a few weeks ago, believing the set the stable had were too old and worn for her to be wearing aboard such a star.

  ‘The Slipper, here we come,’ her jubilant trainer tells the race day media contingent. ‘There’s five weeks to go, she won’t run again (before that). We’re in the field now, so I’ll follow the same program I did with her before she won the Inglis Classic. With two year olds, they’re here today, gone tomorrow. But fingers crossed, everything has fallen into place for us so far.’

  Although the complete breakdown of sectional times was un-available due to a ‘technical failure’ on course, Chance Bye ran the last 600 metres of her race in 34.18 seconds, a tick quicker than Star Witness in the Blue Diamond.

  Even Gai Waterhouse, who trained the third place-getter and is arguably Australia’s top trainer of juveniles, was singing this filly’s praises in the Sunday Telegraph on 28 February 2010. ‘Chance Bye, there’s no fluke about her. She jumps and runs, has brilliant speed and just says “see you later, alligator”.

  ‘They just can’t catch her. She deserves to be the Golden Slipper favourite. I’m very happy for her trainer and Kathy O’Hara. It’s great for racing.’

  Meanwhile, down in Melbourne, Marvellous Miss—still the only member of Rosie’s Class of 2009 to have made it to the races—runs third in the Inglis Premier, over 1200 metres, again doing her best work at the end of the race. It looks like her trainer is right; she will be a much better three year old, but has done well to pick up good prize money for her owners, every time she has raced. But she will probably head to the paddock for a rest, on the same truck as Rosie.

  Chapter 20

  Black honeycomb

  Forty-eight hours later, on 1 March, exactly a year to the day we started this journey, Robbie Griffiths is back at Oaklands for this year’s Premier Yearling Sale.

  Alarmingly, when I ring to wish him well and check on Rosie, he is not at all confident about her future. He thinks her knee has become more inflamed in the past couple of weeks and wants to have it X-rayed again.

  ‘I think it looks worse, I really do, but maybe I’m just being paranoid,’ he says as he drives into the sales complex.

  ‘Maybe I’ve been looking at it so much I’m seeing something that’s not there, maybe I’m worrying too much about it, because no one else seems to be. It’s certainly not bothering the filly at all, and the jockeys keep saying there’s nothing wrong with her action, which means she’s not feeling it, and maybe it’s just going to be like this for the rest of her life. But I just want to be sure it hasn’t degenerated since when we last had it scanned.

  ‘If she had been sold here last year as a yearling, the vet would have advised me not to buy her, the knee would have been seen as too high risk. And I think it’s come to a point now where we need to know.

  ‘She’s out in the paddock again and that will be good for her. But if the knee has got worse, I think we need to discuss what it means, because if it’s not going to hold up through another preparation, which will cost you guys another $10,000 or so, then we might have to make a decision before that.’

  For a second or two, the only thing rattling round in my head is that crazy robot in the old TV series Lost In Space, who would say ‘Danger, Will Robins
on, danger!’ at precisely this kind of moment. I force myself to ask my trainer the obvious question. Should I have had Rosie’s legs X-rayed when she was a yearling, even though she wasn’t heading to the sales?

  ‘Well, in retrospect, it would have been good to have done that. But to be honest, you had no reason to suspect there was a problem, and home-breds like Rosie usually go straight to the trainers to be broken in and start work, just like Rosie has done. I didn’t think of it either,’ Robbie admits. ‘Until the knee started to change.’

  I ask again if Danny Adam had felt anything wrong with that leg in particular when he rode her in work a few days earlier.

  ‘No, he didn’t and to tell you the truth, I was surprised he didn’t push her out that last furlong, because I didn’t think there was anything wrong with her action at all. And this is what I mean, maybe I’m just paranoid, maybe the knee hasn’t got any worse and it’s just something we have to live with. But I just want to have another look at it to be sure.’

  As Robbie heads into the sales auditorium, he says he has his eye on a couple of yearlings going through the ring today. He actually buys five that first day—including another Elvstroem and yes, another God’s Own—and at the end of the four-day auction, has spent more than $700,000 for the second year in a row. This time, he is the third biggest buyer and sounds tired yet buoyant off the back of the final session, no doubt already starting to plan selling the horses he has just signed for.

  This, it seems, is just part of a thoroughbred trainer’s lot in 2010. Being able to condition horses well enough to compete at racing’s top level is one thing, choosing potential young athletes another. But perhaps a trainer’s greatest skill of all is convincing others, usually people with very little to do with horses, to have enough faith in the youngsters he has chosen to cover the cost of their initial outlay.

  As usual, Robbie is also circumspect about the one he thinks might have got away, this time a Bel Esprit colt who failed the vet’s inspection.