WINNERS, LOWLIFE & LOSERS!
Hobby breeding, racing and training of thoroughbreds in Australia.
PROLOGUE
It’s February 2010, my birthday, and Ashma’s Gold[NZ] has just won a race on the Sunshine Coast! What a thrill, being part-owner through a syndicate of this thoroughbred mare, who has done what 90% of thoroughbred horses never do: win a race at a major race course!
And what a journey it’s been to reach this point, to be able to enjoy these thrilling moments even while Dementia/Alzheimer’s disease has been trying to sap and destroy my mental faculties over the past four years while I have been collating these memoirs of the participants, who have played their respective parts in my life’s journey.
Like millions of Australian racing fans, I so clearly remember my most enjoyable moments in this industry. Such as watching the highlights of the 2006 Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival, with Tawqeet winning the Caulfield Cup (after I had picked him to win at the wonderful odds of 20 to 1), Fields of Omagh winning his second Cox Plate at the lovely old age of nine, and Miss Finland proving once again that she is a world class champion in the making. To see the top trainers like Hayes, Waterhouse, Cummings, Rogerson and Freedman, the well known big time race winners displaying their magnificent racing thoroughbreds for the whole world to see, is something that dreams are made of.
Reality check: I realise after 20-plus years of studying pedigrees and breeding thoroughbreds on a small scale, that the only thing the hobby breeder has in common with the top trainers mentioned above is the horse. That’s where the similarities end.
To elaborate, my experience with racehorses goes back to when at about age six I would go with my late father to the local S P bookmaker, who was the town’s shoe shop owner, to put on an occasional cash wager. I remember him looking at me suspiciously and asking “What about him?” My father replying “Forget about him, something’s wrong with him, he is as dumb as”.
Later on in senior school years, my mate and I would listen to Melbourne Cups like all the other Aussies kids and have small bets. I still have quite vivid memories of Light Fingers and Ziema battling out the finish in 1965, mine ran second.
What started out as a dream, slowly by surely developed into a long and protracted nightmare from which there seemed to be no escape. To dream is healthy, provided the dreams are not confused with unrealistic expectations. If you can’t dream, then don’t get out of bed in the morning as dreams, I believe, are a survival mechanism.
I am shell-shocked by how I, and the stock I so lovingly bred and raised, was treated by the low calibre persons who hang about in this miserable and rotten end of the thoroughbred racing game. For years I believed I was to blame and was making the mistakes: probably a legacy of my rigid Catholic upbringing no doubt – “Mea Culpa”. But nothing could be further from the truth.
On reflection, I have since concluded that 80 percent of the people in this end of the racing industry are chronic liars, thieves, bums, derelicts, no hopers, losers, drunks, deadbeats, and any other name one cares to throw at them. It is impossible to avoid them. They are also heartless, callous and very cruel. Whatever their forte is, it is not animals and certainly not racehorses.
I never thought I would be writing about this industry, but the number of people I have met Australia-wide experiencing the same sad story as my own, run into the thousands. In fact I was given a notebook by a fellow former breeder James Bennet who has experienced much the same as I have. He encouraged me to ‘go for it’. He was convinced that I’d underestimated the percentage of rat-bags, and was more likely to be in the vicinity of 90 percent.
Returning to my opening comments about top trainers, these people win Group races and continue to do so because they get the good horses; they look after the horses and owners, and are dedicated professionals. They cannot afford to have poor performing, sick animals in their care, and they don’t.
Then of course, there are the quality small-time trainers who are as highly qualified as the big boys and girls, who win their share of these top races, but on a much smaller scale.
Having bred and raced thoroughbreds in four States in Australia, I can talk about this subject with some authority.
Australia Racing is a huge industry employing thousands of people, generating hundreds of millions in revenue for the public, for its promoters and for the Tax Office. In all, it is one of the most successful businesses in the country, certainly worth protecting and expanding. The average Aussie loves following it and loves a bet...it is a big part of the Australian way of life. I have supported it myself for most of my life, and continue to do so in one form or another, along with family and friends.
I would encourage anyone else to do the same, albeit in a rather different manner to the way that I have, otherwise the constant flow of negatives will sour all of one’s aspirations, dreams and motivation.
Don’t let the rotten bastards that proliferate in this superb industry grind you down. Hopefully, knowledge of my experiences will make your part more rewarding. The road to success will be much more pleasant and far less dramatic, depressing, and financially painful.
From experience, I have learnt to visit intended studs personally: first impressions count above all. If you don’t like what you see forget about how good the stallion is and walk away. You are only kidding yourself, if you think your horse will survive that lot. Just contemplate the pictures in this book of some of these terribly rundown establishments! Initially I was naïve and trusting, so my stock paid the price physically, and I paid the price financially.
The racehorse industry as a whole has very little wrong with it, the type it attracts can be the problem – the lowest types of human beings in the country seem to be in it. I know this is not entirely so, it just feels like it.
It is generally accepted that anything government run is never hugely successful, to put it mildly, and thoroughbred racing and quarantine are no exceptions. The new ‘ratings’ system introduced to Australia has proven so far to be a debacle. It may be okay for large city and provincial trainers, but it leaves the many small time country trainers, owners, and their horses out in ‘no man’s land’. Racing in country Australia has been in decline for many years and this new system does nothing to alleviate the problem; it only exacerbates it. There seems to be no understanding by racing officials that the quality of horses is regional Australia is, with very few exceptions, ordinary and they are the very ‘poor cousins’ of their city counterparts, regardless of breeding. They are often the city rejects.
Quarantine failed us with the Equine Influenza outbreak – thank God it was not Foot and Mouth Disease. I have always spoken out in favour of artificial insemination of thoroughbreds and I am obviously years ahead of my time. The Equine Influenza outbreak has shown the need for its (artificial insemination) use and acceptance regardless of the old diehards refusing to consider it. Just imagine what semen from Star Kingdom, Northern Dancer, Danehill or Bletchingly, to mention a few great stallions, would be worth today. I think industry leaders have missed the boat badly, just for the sake of ‘tradition’.
While I am on the subject of idiosyncratic views, the notion put forward for decades that racehorses by the same sire, but from different mares, are not half brothers or half sisters is ludicrous, because legally they are. Ironically, DNA is used to prove parentage, and then to deny it!
I am writing this book, because I am a firm believer in the good old Aussie notion of a fair go for everyone, which is contrary to the grossly objectionable and un-Australian way we and our horses were treated almost all of the time.
‘Pay peanuts, you get monkeys!’ This adage is an inadequate over-simplification of a very serious problem. We didn’t pay peanuts, but, we still got monkeys. The last trainer we used, R Heathcote, carried off the Brisbane Metropolitan Trainer’s Premiership in 2009. He’s no cheap monkey, but in my opinion he behaves like one: he knows all about monkey business and knows how to monkey around.
If I wrote my memoirs along the lines of going to the races and winning, then some time later, going to the races and winning again, then at some point, winning again, boring, boring: who would want to read about that, let alone publish it? Most of those winning races in town or at the provincials have no idea, or very little, of what is happening in the real world. My story illustrates the truth conclusively.
Racing in the country is not declining because of a natural gradual decline over a long period. The people I write about are the architects of their own demise, though they cannot see it. The prevailing attitude of ‘shut up say nothing, just keep quiet and don’t cause trouble’ is not going to benefit the future of racing, quite the contrary, in fact. These people are unable to see the big picture.
I am not writing as an aggrieved punter or a sore loser/owner who imagined they had a Phar Lap that no one else recognized. This is no hard luck, sour-grapes story. I derived enormous pleasure and personal satisfaction researching pedigrees, breeding, raising and educating my own stock, and winning on Melbourne Cup Day on the Gold Coast; Magic Millions and all that!
And as you have already read, I am still getting my share of thrills...
