AT HALF-PAST NINE ON the morning of 14 September 2011, as the last wisps of fog lifted from the lush green hills of Australia’s ‘horse country’ in the Hunter Valley, spring’s blossoming of life brought forth a new foal. It was a smooth, trouble-free birth. The mare had been through this once before, and there was nothing remarkable to this start of a new life which came, as nature intends, at the start of a new day.
Other than pedigree, horse breeders at this stage don’t know anything about a newborn, just like human parents. A baby could become a poet, a prime minister, or a fool. This thoroughbred filly was designed to be a racehorse — hopefully a good one. The racing world at that time was agog about another female who’d won her first thirteen starts, Black Caviar. Dreams are free.
A new foal could also be one of nature’s duds. One of the many, the unheard-from majority, who will never win a race. One of the dreaded number who somehow aren’t put together to run particularly fast, or who through various misfortunes will never even see a racetrack.
But from the first minutes this bundle of gangly limbs and brown fluff spent out of her mother’s womb, there was at least something to go on: a tiny glimmer. Most foals will sit on the ground, taking in their new world for a good half-hour before attempting their first steps.
This filly was on her feet in less than ten minutes.
It raised the odd eyebrow, drew measured nods of approval from the seasoned horse people watching. So too her preparedness from very early on to stroll from her mother and explore the corners of her paddock, showing inquisitiveness, confidence and spirit. It was a good sign, a hint that this one had some ‘go’ in her.
You still know nothing, of course. But hindsight suggests there was, in fact, not an overabundance of hope read into these tiny spring buds of character.
The horse was Winx, and she would change everything.
***
For the billions of dollars poured into it, horse breeding is a terribly, maddeningly, inexact science.
In the 300 years since the arrival in England of the three Arabian stallions from which all today’s thoroughbreds descend — the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerley Turk — the breed has been refined, researched and refined again. Like looking down through the tapering levels of a pyramid, you can look back through the generations — three centuries’ worth, if you like — to try to create the horse of your dreams.
But if peering through the form to find a winner is like tackling a particularly testing crossword, trying to breed one presents a large and tortuous cryptic edition. Even more cruelly, there are no right or wrong answers. You breed and you hope.
The conventional wisdom of ‘Good sire plus good dam equals good foal’ lost out very early on to other observations on family ties. Dame Nellie Melba’s sister couldn’t sing. James Cook’s dad couldn’t sail his way out of Whitby Harbour. Banjo Paterson’s brother couldn’t ride or write.
The colt Snaafi Dancer created history in Kentucky in 1983 when bought by the future ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, for the record price of US$10 million (around US$25 million today). A son of legendary North American stallion Northern Dancer, Snaafi Dancer had a pedigree so rich he could nearly have married into the English royal family. Put into work, however, he was found to be suffering from something rather critical: a lack of ability.
Somehow, the way he was made, he simply couldn’t get all his moving parts in sync to gallop fast. He was so slow, connections felt it’d be embarrassing to put him into an actual race. He was sent straight to stud where — insult on injury — he was found virtually sterile. He sired just four foals, three of which raced, none of them very well.
Snaafi Dancer — still the fourth-most expensive yearling in history — remains the poster boy for hit-and-miss breeding. But top billing must go to the ignominiously named The Green Monkey. A descendant of Northern Dancer and the champion Secretariat, he was bought at a 2006 Florida sale after a fierce bidding war between global racing and breeding giant Coolmore and Sheikh Mohammed, who was this time ‘unsuccessful’. The colt flopped in three starts and, again, was packed off to stud, having recouped precisely US$10,440 of his owners’ US$16-million outlay.
Then there are the beacons who keep hope springing eternally. Kingston Town couldn’t find a buyer at his $8000 reserve price at a Victorian yearling sale in 1978, so breeder David Hains kept him, and watched him become one of the country’s greatest. Queensland folk hero Vo Rogue was essentially bought out of racing’s ‘dollar bin’, but turned his $3000 purchase price into $3 million in prizemoney. And though fairy tales are said to be becoming rarer, She Will Reign cost just $20,000 in 2016 and won the world’s richest two-year-old race, Rosehill’s $3.5-million Golden Slipper, a year later.
Breeding’s lottery can make people millionaires or send people mad. It has made John Camilleri look like a genius.
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To describe Winx, you could apply the well-worn tag that sounds harsh while being flattering: freak. To put it more kindly, you could try this: she’s a high point, the exquisite result of 300 years of improving the thoroughbred.
We see it in people. Science leads to better nutrition, training and recovery. Human athletes emerge who are bigger, stronger and faster. Contemporaries like Usain Bolt, Michael Phelps and LeBron James are more successful than any who’ve come before.
Similarly, hundreds of years, trials and errors — and a good amount of science — have produced today’s racehorses, among which Winx stands at the peak.
John Camilleri, of course, had no guarantees of winning the lottery of thoroughbred evolution when he bought his ticket. But the Sydney businessman did think and hope, as canny gamblers do, that he was maximising his chances.
Down to earth, driven and straight-talking, Camilleri’s main business isn’t horses but chickens; his family’s Baiada group boasts the Steggles brand as its flagship enterprise. Camilleri says his family is his number-one priority, then his business, and then breeding horses. It’s a sideline to take his mind off work, just as some people like puzzles. Camilleri owns broodmares and constantly looks to buy more who might produce talented foals, who will in turn enhance the value of the line when future offspring go to auction. When he travels, he takes a vast pedigree book with him, thumbing through thoroughbred bloodlines, seeking a link, a combination, a perfect match to pique his interest. Perhaps some clues scattered through these ancestries will lead him to buy a mare. He’ll then pay more to breed her with a stallion he sees bringing a potent recipe of bloodlines, with ingredients like inherited ability, physiological make-up, and intangibles such as a competitive nature or desire to lead the pack — better known as the will to win.
By contrast, there was more serendipity than science behind Camilleri’s introduction to the inside of racing. In 1998, he and four friends, wanting to own a racehorse, lunched with syndicator Harry Lawton at a Sydney restaurant. Lawton showed them photos of two horses, and the group swiftly made their choice. Racing as Fairway, the gelding won them the 2000 AJC Derby and three other Group 1s: the highest tier of races, with the most prizemoney and prestige.
The novice owners couldn’t believe their luck, but their heady success prompted a warning from their hard-bitten old trainer, Jack Denham.
‘Boys, it might be great fun,’ he said, ‘but it’s all downhill from here.’1
Denham, trainer of late ’90s champion Might And Power, was an astute racing man. But in regard to Camilleri, he wasn’t entirely on the money.
Camilleri ventured into racing more seriously. Enticed by the intricacies of bloodlines, he started a boutique breeding business: Fairway Thoroughbreds. Still a hobby, though on a scale most of us would call big business, Camilleri built Fairway into an entity with around twenty-five broodmares. There were notable successes, with Camilleri breeding several Group 1 winners. There was Dariana, who beat her male rivals to win the 2010 Queensland Derby. Gathering took out that year’s Railway Stakes in Perth. The filly Invest won the Schweppes Oaks in Adelaide in 2012.
There was One Last Dance, who earned two lower-level wins of the esteemed ‘black type’ variety — Groups 1, 2 and 3, and the Listed band just below. They’re so called because such ancestral successes feature in bold print in yearling sales catalogues, boosting a descendant’s value. A Time For Julia was also a dual black-type winner. Camilleri would also breed a 2012 colt called Vancouver who’d go on to win the Golden Slipper.
But there is one ‘making of’ story to tower above them all.
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In 2008, Camilleri was talking broodmares with Peter O’Brien. An affable Irishman and renowned horseman, O’Brien had been Camilleri’s long-term breeding adviser, and a friend. He was also studmaster at the Coolmore empire’s Australian base at Jerrys Plains in the Hunter Valley, where he looked after several of Camilleri’s mares.
With a broodmare sale coming up on the Gold Coast, the two men had been engaged in their usual form of preparation. The Australian and the Irishman would independently circle their fancies in the sales catalogues, then compare notes to hopefully agree on selections Camilleri would aim to buy.
‘Typically, we would agree on around seventy per cent of them and argue about the rest,’ Camilleri once said of his long-term collaborator.2
Once they arrived at the sale, however, things didn’t quite go to plan.
‘Vegas Showgirl wasn’t on the list,’ O’Brien would later recall, ‘but I saw her being paraded at the other end of the stables row where I was inspecting one on our list. She stopped me in my tracks . . . a female Adonis.
‘You won’t see a more perfect head, she has the best hip you could wish to see on a mare and all this is packaged with her size and length, her lovely balance and an extraordinary action when she walks.’3
Quickly, more was found out about the six-year-old. She’d been bred in New Zealand, where mineral-rich soil and high rainfall make for an ideal horse nursery, though her parents were Australian. Her sire was Al Akbar, who had won at Group 1 level in Sydney, while her dam was Vegas Magic, a daughter of Voodoo Rhythm, one of the first Northern Dancer stallions imported to Australia.
There was also racing kismet behind how Vegas Showgirl came about. New Zealander Graeme Rogerson — well known in Australia for his years of training here, including a Melbourne Cup success with Efficient — had bought Vegas Magic in Melbourne with a view to breed from her in his homeland. He sent her to the North Island’s Grangewilliam Stud to mate with the well-credentialled Batavian, whom he’d trained, only to learn the stallion had gone in a bittersweet way — dropping dead of a heart attack while serving a mare. A quick decision was taken to send Vegas Magic to the stud’s associate sire Al Akbar instead. The resultant foal was Vegas Showgirl, and she’d become one of the best known broodmares of modern times.4
Before that, though, the impressive bay would prove a handy racehorse, a stakes (or black type) winning mare who claimed seven races from thirty-five starts either side of the Tasman for Rogerson, for a decent $225,000 prizemoney. Her last win came in June 2007. In what would later prove a momentous coincidence, it was at the Sunshine Coast, on Caloundra Cup day.
Observing her in the Gold Coast stables, Camilleri and O’Brien resolved that Vegas Showgirl would be an asset to Fairway’s breeding barn. Theirs weren’t the only heads turned, however, and a spirited bidding duel ensued before the prize was caught for a hefty $455,000.
Camilleri’s first mating choice with Vegas Showgirl was boom sire Encosta De Lago. The resulting filly fetched $150,000 at a 2012 yearling sale. Named Miss Atom Bomb, she was emerging as a Golden Slipper prospect before respiratory problems forced her retirement, unraced.
For Vegas Showgirl’s second big date, Camilleri made his most portentous choice yet.
Street Cry, bred in Ireland, was a superb American racehorse, winning five of twelve starts and placing in the other seven, for US$5 million prizemoney. In 2002, he won twice at Group 1, in the 2000-metre Dubai World Cup and the 1800-metre Stephen Foster Handicap at the home of the Kentucky Derby, Churchill Downs. He then became a global force at stud, shuttling between Kentucky and Australia for Sheikh Mohammed’s Darley breeding operation. His dual-hemisphere progeny included Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense and Melbourne Cup winner Shocking. The most notable of all was American wonder mare Zenyatta. In feats to be echoed by a certain other daughter of his in Australia, Zenyatta became one of the all-time greats, storming to nineteen straight wins between 2007 and 2011, only to taste defeat at her twentieth and last start.
Darley’s chief operating officer Oliver Tait described Street Cry’s offspring as ‘easy horses to train’, ‘tough, willing and genuine’, winning at all distances, and particularly strong in the last 400 metres of a race.5 Australian fans would learn he wasn’t wrong.
Helped in no small part by Winx, Street Cry would become Australia’s leading sire, by prizemoney won by progeny, in 2015–16. Alas, by then he’d suffered a premature demise, having to be euthanised in Australia on 17 September 2014, due to a neurological condition.
In 2010, Street Cry’s service fee was among the highest in the world at $110,000. John Camilleri deemed it a worthy investment.
***
The mingling of bloodlines looks spectacular now. But even at the time there was cause for salivation.
The match-up brought the influence of Street Cry’s grandsire Mr Prospector, the 1970s American sprinter who established a male-line dynasty bettered only in modern times by that of the colossus Northern Dancer. It also brought the strong presence, on both sides of the aisle, of a great American broodmare called Natalma.
Natalma was the dam of Northern Dancer, so it’s a given she’ll appear in many pedigrees the world over. There she is — in the ‘bottom’, or maternal, half of Winx’s pedigree — with Northern Dancer a great-grandsire of Vegas Showgirl. But in the same fifth generation of the paternal half, there’s Natalma again, through the superb female line she also established. Natalma was the dam of Raise The Standard, the maternal granddam of Street Cry’s sire, Machiavellian.
A decent racehorse, Natalma became a sensation as a broodmare. Her knack for bearing winners who bore other winners, who bore other winners, earned her regard as a precious ‘blue hen’ of the breeding barn. Natalma threw a string of stakes-winning horses in America, and her offspring produced similarly well around the world. This included Spring Adieu, whose grandson Danehill became a worldwide breeding giant and won the Australian sires’ title a staggering nine times up until 2005, a record unlikely to be broken. Several other notables have Natalma on both sides of their ancestry, headed by undefeated English champion Frankel, and the aforementioned Street Sense.
Similar to Winx’s genetic picture, Black Caviar had the great Vain on both sides in relatively recent layers of her pedigree. Many call it ‘line-breeding’ when it works, and ‘in-breeding’ when it doesn’t. For these two mares modern Australians have been so lucky to behold, it worked, and worked phenomenally.