THE DONCASTER MILE DOESN’T feature as highly on the world’s race rankings as the George Ryder. In fact, sharing thirty-eighth place in the 2016 list, it was behind even the Chipping Norton Stakes, at equal eleventh, and was rated only Australia’s sixth-best race.
But for prestige in Australian eyes, for respect for the toughness of the winner, it’s one of the most zealously sought prizes in the country — notwithstanding its lucrative $3-million purse. It’s a handicap held over the Randwick 1600 metres, but so rigorous are the demands required, in a big field thundering at an exhausting pace, it’s said a horse must be proven at 2000 metres to win it.
First held in 1866, its recent winners include the superb Tobin Bronze in 1967; Gunsynd in 1972; the wonderful mare Maybe Mahal in 1978; Emancipation, who won as a three-year-old filly in 1983; and dual winner of the early ’90s, Super Impose. Sunline had underlined her champion status by winning it twice, three years apart in 1999 and 2002.
The Doncaster also held a special place in Waller’s heart. It had produced his first Group 1 winner, Triple Honour, in 2008. He’d won four of the seven since.
Now Winx had the chance to join an elite band of seven horses who’d won Sydney’s two big miles in the same season, including Gunsynd, Super Impose, Chatham in 1934, and the winner of the first editions of both races, Dundee, in 1865–66. She’d also be striving to become only the second horse to win the Cox Plate and Doncaster in the same season, a feat which highlighted the immense quality of Tobin Bronze.
Of course, it wouldn’t be easy. Not only were there fourteen highly-tuned rivals but also, for what would turn out to be the last time in her career, she’d be at the mercy of the handicapper. Like that of many exceptional horses, Winx’s body of work was becoming so strong, it meant she’d be given extremely hefty weights in handicaps from this point on, especially if she won this one. After this race, her engagements would be weight-for-age or set-weights only.
Winx had broken a 116-year-old mares’ record in hefting 57 kilograms to win the Epsom Handicap. In the Doncaster, she’d carry 56.5. The apparent drop was misleading, of course, since weights had been raised 4 kilograms for the Epsom and she’d still been just 1 kilo above the minimum. Carrying 56.5 kilograms in the tougher Doncaster would be a formidable challenge. Winx would have to set a weight-carrying record for a four-year-old mare in the race. The only female winners with more weight had been five or older. The only two four-year-old female winners since World War II had been My Gold Hope, with 53.5 kilograms in 1982, and Private Steer, with 53 kilograms in 2004.
Sunline had attempted the Cox Plate–Doncaster double in 1999–2000 at age four, but under 57.5 kilograms in the second leg she finished second. Two other outstanding four-year-old mares — Typhoon Tracy and More Joyous — had carried Winx’s weight in the race since, as favourites, and finished fourteenth and eleventh.
Exacerbating Winx’s task, the handicapping rules had been relaxed since the Epsom controversy, allowing the Australian Turf Club (ATC) to set a minimum topweight of just 57 kilograms. Winx would shoulder an intimidating impost, and be only half a kilo below topweights Kermadec, who was the previous year’s winner, and Turn Me Loose. Worse, with the minimum weight only 50 kilograms, she’d be giving several kilos to well-performed rivals of both genders.
Happy Clapper, the five-year-old gelding who was fifth in the George Ryder, drew support at double-figure odds after being ‘thrown in’ to the Doncaster with just 50.5 kilograms. Highly rated Melbourne three-year-old Azkadellia, a last-start half-length second in the 1500-metre fillies-and-mares Group 1, the Coolmore Classic, had just 50 kilograms. First Seal had 53.
Little wonder that when weights had been released after Winx’s first-up win in the Apollo Stakes, Waller said her handicap was ‘disappointing’. He was also mindful of asking too much of the mare, given she was likely to back up a week later in the Queen Elizabeth.
More momentously, the release of weights had triggered something possibly never to be seen again: Winx drifted in the betting. From a joint $6 favourite she blew to $7.50 behind the $4.60 favourite Press Statement (who’d later be withdrawn). These wobbles, however, were before the Chipping Norton and the Ryder Stakes. By Doncaster day, Winx was in a more customary role — for her, though unfamiliar for this event — as an odds-on favourite. In the history of the race, only one other horse had started odds-on, with Sky High running third at $1.90 in 1961.
Still, handicaps or not, punters wouldn’t hear of a Winx defeat and she firmed on the day to start at $1.80. Azkadellia was second-favourite, way out at $9, ahead of Kermadec at $11, Happy Clapper at $13, Turn Me Loose at $21 and First Seal at $25.
Debbie Kepitis, trackside and in her ‘combat gear’, was sure the Doncaster would be Winx’s hardest test. ‘It’s a tough handicap and it favours horses lower in the weights. Good horses can get beaten in the Doncaster, as Lonhro did,’ she said of her father’s former star, who came fourth as topweight and favourite in 2003.1
Bowman, too, stayed cautiously optimistic, telling an interviewer, ‘It’s a horse race, so I’m certainly not going in there under any illusion that she’s just going to win. We will need things to go our way, and every horse race has a different tale. I’ll be going into the race treating it like any other race and I’ll be doing my best to give her her best chance.’2
***
On a fine and sunny early April Saturday at Randwick, with a soft 6 track rating likely to suit Winx perfectly, the recognition that this was not your average star horse had gone up a notch. More than 2000 Winx caps were handed out to the crowd, dotting the stands and concourse in royal blue, and helping heighten the growing mania for the mare. Doncaster Day, one of the feature programmes of the Sydney calendar, had been relatively quiet for Bowman and Waller as they awaited Winx’s engagement in the ninth race of ten, with the jockey thus far winless and Waller celebrating only stayer Libran’s victory in the Group 2 Chairman’s Handicap.
Waller did get to cheer the Australian Derby victory of New Zealand long shot Tavago, trained by Trent Busuttin, son of his old boss Paddy. Racegoers cheered a stirring last-to-first win by the superb sprinter Chautauqua in the day’s feature sprint, the T.J. Smith Stakes. And the meeting had started auspiciously for the Winx camp when her little half-brother El Divino dead-heated for first in his first black-type race, the Kindergarten Stakes.
Finally, amid lengthening late afternoon shadows, the time came for Winx’s big test, and the large crowd sat up in expectation of another dominant performance from the mare. But midway through this much anticipated appearance, Winx would need to prove her greatness, and have things go her way, like never before. As eyes focused on the Randwick mile start, in the course’s north-east corner below busy Alison Road, no one could have expected the drama that was about to transpire.
After a seemingly interminable wait of some twenty-five seconds, while the field settled down in the barriers, the gates finally sprang open. Winx got away fairly from barrier eleven, but soon drifted towards an inside run and settled fourth-last. It didn’t look unusual, but Waller later revealed it wasn’t in the plan to be that far back in the large fifteen-horse field, the biggest Winx had seen since beating three more in the Sunshine Coast Guineas.
As the field headed up the back straight, what was more frightening to Waller and Bowman than Winx’s position was that there was an obvious cause for it. As was clear to Waller watching on TV, Bowman knew the great mare wasn’t travelling so great at all. She was labouring; not quite a sputtering engine, but well short of her usual strong and zestful self.
As the pack surged past the 1000, under a lightning pace set by the lightweight bolter Vergara, Bowman had clear air to his outside, sitting eight lengths off the pace. But, unusually, rather than sitting still, Bowman was seen to be urging Winx along, his arms pumping in rhythm, not fixed in place holding her steady.
Bowman had to start thinking. With the field staying off the rail, a midfield bunch four-abreast in front of him, and Winx feeling unusually off-key beneath him, he wasn’t about to hook dangerously wide, setting her the task of covering extra distance. Instead, he looked for a path between horses as he clicked her up, again with more force than usual, approaching the 600.
At the 500, those in the stands could barely see Winx. She was comprehensively buried — three horses to her left, six to her right, another three in her way, and still eight lengths off Vergara. With her jockey still pushing her for an effort, the traffic jam around Winx looked intimidating. It was reflected by caller Darren Flindell, who sounded with alarm, ‘Bowman’s riding for luck on Winx!’
And, watching in the trainers’ room, Waller was a mess of jangling nerves. This time, the minefield was a very dark place indeed. He was consumed by one grim thought: ‘Today’s the day.’
Turning into the straight, Winx finally had picked up the bit and was getting into her work. But though trying to move through her gears, she still had nowhere to go. Bowman looked for routes out of the frenzied herd, but saw only rumps. There was a narrow run, maybe, between bolter Aomen and Kermadec, but ahead of that was Stratum Star, with First Seal to his right. And as a hundred metres disappeared in no time, Vergara, with just 50 kilograms, had skipped further away. She was four lengths ahead of Stratum Star in second. She was a gaping seven lengths ahead of Winx.
Everyone at Randwick, and the many thousands watching around the country, resigned themselves to the probability, the apparent certainty, that Winx’s streak was about to end.
But as the field flew down the straight, at last a run appeared to Bowman’s right. As Aomen fell away, and First Seal also weakened, Bowman steered Winx towards Stratum Star’s inside, and to his relief the mare quickly responded, feeling more like the horse he knew. Daylight had appeared and Bowman went for home — but, with just 300 metres to go, Vergara was still four lengths ahead. Winx was also on the inside part of the track, on softer turf churned by eight earlier races. And now Happy Clapper emerged from the ruck, steaming home on the better ground out wide, and with precious little weight on his back.
By the 200, Winx was charging, moving to claim the tiring Vergara. But Happy Clapper was matching stride, and now another flyweight, Azkadellia, stormed up closest to the fence. With the crowd roaring, from the 200 to the 150, it looked like a race in three.
Not for long.
Winx — the Winx Bowman knew — bolted clear under hands-and-heels riding and then, with one light flick of the whip, she found another level still, leaving the lightweights flat-footed. In a blink, she skipped to a two-length lead, a burst that, deservedly, drew gasps.
As Waller exhaled, as the three owners whooped for joy, as veteran racegoers swapped disbelieving glances, Winx surged clear for an epic victory. As as she hit the line, an emotional Flindell boomed out what so many were thinking: ‘She’s a champion, Winx!’
Surely now the title was fitting, especially in Bowman’s mind. He revealed, as the mare caught her breath, that he’d had serious doubts during the torrid mile-long test, and not for any fleeting moment.
‘Halfway through the race, she didn’t feel right,’ he said. ‘Today was the first time I’ve ridden her that halfway through the race I was concerned.
‘The worn track is racing on the worst side of soft, and it’s had a fair bit of use. She wasn’t overly comfortable in it, so the fact that she wasn’t comfortable and still produced that finish is something that only a horse of champion qualities can do.
‘To rely on a horse like this is just unbelievable. It’s an absolute honour to be involved with her.’
As he let down again, digesting the two-length win over Happy Clapper and Azkadellia, Waller gave an insight into the growing pressures of training such a rare horse, saying the build-up this time — the interest from the media and the public as she set after the prestigious Doncaster — had been more gruelling than ever.
‘It’s been a pretty tough week, to say the least. This is a new level for me. I don’t know how Peter Moody did it with Black Caviar,’ he said, adding that enduring ‘the longest Doncaster I’ve watched’ was even more agonising.
‘I thought she was beaten at the half mile, let alone the 600-metre mark. She was going nowhere and I have never seen Hughie have to niggle her.
‘She never gets right back there unless we are taking her back from wide draws, but that was not really the plan.’
Reflecting that ‘we took on the handicapper and won’, Waller was at last able to loosen up. Amid the post-race euphoria, from the Winx inner sanctum and the Randwick crowd, he finally allowed himself to utter the words many had thought overdue.
‘She’s a champion.’
***
Three days after the Doncaster, Waller made a not quite as joyous but not entirely unexpected announcement: Winx would not contest the Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
Reflecting the level of interest now in the horse, Waller made the announcement through a press release.
‘We are a little concerned that the winning run in the Doncaster did require a lot of effort, which is hard to quantify, but visibly looking at her this morning, I can see a horse that, although she is at ninety per cent, we don’t feel she is a hundred per cent her normal self,’ he said.
Waller said to back up in seven days for a 2000-metre race, against a weight-for-age field, would ‘just be expecting too much of a horse that puts so much determination into her races’. ‘I am very mindful that the public do want to see her race on Saturday,’ he said, ‘but it is more important that the public get to see her race next preparation and beyond.’
Long after the dust had settled, Waller was able to reflect more fully on the highly charged, indeed life-affirming moment Winx had allowed him. ‘I’m certainly respectful of the history of racing,’ he said. ‘To have a horse of your own to call a champion is an emotional thought, an emotional statement to make. But Winx proved to me she was a champion in the Doncaster.’3
As she went for a well-earned rest, having won nine starts in a row, including six Group 1s, and a touch more than $6 million in prizemoney, there came two more momentous nods to Winx’s newly bestowed champion tag.
On the same day that Waller made his announcement, her younger half-brother, a full brother to El Divino by leading sire Snitzel out of Vegas Showgirl, was sold by John Camilleri for a whopping $2.3 million to Dubai thoroughbred heavyweight Nasser Lootah, topping the Sydney Easter Yearling Sales. (The colt would be named Boulder City, and enter Gai Waterhouse’s stable.)
Five days after that, the latest set of World Thoroughbred Rankings were issued in France. Winx, the average-looking, late-blooming mare who’d started out by winning just four of her first ten starts, was now the equal-best horse on the planet. The IFHA had, after the Doncaster, given her the top rating of 126, alongside America’s Dubai World Cup winner, California Chrome.
With that stallion being a dirt-track performer, Winx — Australia’s horse — was now the greatest show on turf.