LIKE A MODERN EQUIVALENT of The Beatles, only with half the legs, Winx was making headlines without even trying, even during her spell in the winter of 2016.
Some laurels were starting to come her way, beginning with her crowning, very unsurprisingly, as New South Wales Horse of the Year. Media outlets also reported that despite a growing clamour, she’d likely not race overseas in the near future, partly since Australian prizemoney was superior to that of most other places. Other reports spoke of long-range plots from the U.S. and the U.K. to send their best contenders to dethrone her in the Cox Plate.
There were stories, of course, about her equal world-number-one billing. Her 126 rating from her Doncaster triumph had been reinforced a week later by the placegetters, with Happy Clapper running third in the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth Stakes to Lucia Valentina, and Azkadellia winning the Group 1 Queen of the Turf Stakes.
Conversation and debate flourished over Winx’s place in the annals of great race mares. Prominent Herald Sun racing writer Matt Stewart rated his particular ‘Big Four’ as Sunline first, Makybe Diva second, Black Caviar third and Winx fourth.
The man closest to Winx agreed.
‘What those other great mares had was longevity,’ Waller said. ‘They did it for three, four seasons. We need at least another big season to be compared to them.’1
Also during Winx’s break between campaigns came another reminder to Waller of the pressures of training such a horse. Four days after her Doncaster win, after announcing she would not contest the Queen Elizabeth Stakes and would instead be spelled, Waller had had Winx thoroughly X-rayed. It was a precautionary measure, not expected to reveal any problems, before she went to the paddock. In fact, a tiny floating bone chip was found, in her near (left) fore fetlock. Though vets felt it had been there for some time without impeding the mare, Waller decided to have it removed, in a relatively minor procedure. Since Winx was about to spell for around three months, he didn’t think it was important enough to notify stewards. Normal practice was to tell them about such treatment on a horse before accepting to run it in any given race.
The trouble was, Winx was no normal horse. During her spell, money continued to flood in about her winning a second Cox Plate in the spring. Some punters took umbrage that Waller had not made Winx’s surgery public, minor though it was, at the time it was done. When Waller finally notified them — after Winx barrier trialled in July ahead of a scheduled August racing return — Racing NSW stewards held an inquiry, but found Waller was not in breach of laws concerning notification. Still, this didn’t convince all punters, some of whom even wrote to Waller himself.
‘I should have said something at the time but I didn’t,’ Waller would later recall. ‘Each week that went along, [notification] became more pressing, but we decided to wait until she trialled, then it was sort of too late.
‘We got hate mail. I guess there was a lesson in it.’2
The saga, somewhat blown out of proportion, was another message for Waller that training a ‘people’s horse’ brings high scrutiny. As Winx was starting to change racing history, Waller was having to change with it. The attention was not easily absorbed by the intense, and largely shy and private, boy from Foxton — as was revealed in media articles, ironically, written to feed a public demand to know more about him.
‘I’ve probably always been a bit paranoid about what people think and it’s something I admit to,’ he said.3
It was another reason Waller liked to bury himself away to watch races, unlike the archetypal picture of a trainer in the grandstands watching through a pair of binoculars, urging their horse on with its owners.
He was worried people were thinking, ‘Oh, I hope Waller gets beat’. The feeling was at its worst during a hot streak around 2012. ‘We’d won a race every meeting for almost a year. It was twenty-four meetings in a row. Then we lost, and I was just paranoid of everyone watching me when the races were on.’4
It’s said that life is tough at the top, and an uneasy feeling has accommodated Waller’s rare level of achievement. It was particularly acute, he said, during one stretch when he would regularly saddle three or four starters in Group 1 races. ‘I was paranoid,’ he said, ‘that maybe we were perceived as too strong, getting too powerful, and that maybe that wasn’t a good thing in some way.’ It had almost come as a relief, he said, when his stable went through some quieter times.5
There was another reason for his race-watching habit, and it gives insight into how, despite all his success over so many years, he still threw all of himself into his work.
‘I don’t like to go through the emotions of everybody else. A race might take one minute or two minutes — a long race — and you just feel your heart ready to explode,’ he once said, before adding with a sheepish smile, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I have a heart attack one day. I wouldn’t want anyone to see that.’6
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Whether Waller’s preference or not, such quiet times were but a distant memory as Winx, one of the most exciting horses in the world, resumed for the spring of 2016.
As several media outlets eagerly reported, her work would begin in a Randwick barrier trial on 29 July, three days before the new season. Waller outlined a plan for three, possibly four races before Winx’s shimmering target in the distance — trying to become the eleventh horse to win two Cox Plates.
Winx’s spring would bring more of the sublime, a touch of the near-ridiculous as she ‘contested’ a three-horse race, and the prospect of something many fans were dying to see — a fierce and compelling rivalry. It would come from the large and imposing figure of Hartnell.
The rising six-year-old’s racing encounters with the mare had thus far looked unflattering — two attempts, two fifths — but reports from the all-powerful Godolphin camp suggested that in this, the former European’s fourth campaign in Australia, he’d be a far tougher opponent.
The pair resumed battle in that Randwick barrier trial in July, though of course it wasn’t the real thing. Winx ran fourth under a tight hold from Bowman, and Hartnell came in eighth. Winx and Bowman were fourth again in another Randwick trial eleven days later in Hartnell’s absence.
They met again, for real this time, when their campaigns began in earnest in the Group 2 Warwick Stakes, over 1400 metres, at Randwick in late August.
It was ostensibly a soft kill, with just six rivals, and the likes of Hartnell and Lucia Valentina preferring a longer trip. With Melbourne the focus, Waller could have kicked off in Caulfield’s Memsie Stakes, the first Group 1 of the season. But Winx had moved to a different stratum. Waller knew he had to be even more meticulous than everyone thought he was. There were factors counting against a bolder approach in a tougher race: the bigger targets of the later spring; the public’s desire to see their horse keep winning.
‘You don’t want every race to be a grand final,’ he said. ‘The grand finals will be tough enough when they come, but with a horse like her, yes, I admit, you are keen to protect their record when you can.’
Waller was delighted with how the five-year-old Winx had returned, stronger again, to his stable. Mixed with the growing stresses of training a great horse was excitement at this fresh climb towards the standings of those other three champion mares of the recent past.
‘She showed the early potential, then went missing for a while, then started to put it all together,’ he said. ‘She looks like she’s come back very well, if anything a bit bigger, a bit stronger, and hopefully that means she’s a bit better. When I look at her now, I see a mare at her physical and mental peak.’
That was how it looked, too, to anyone watching her ‘warm-up’ run in the Warwick Stakes, on an otherwise quiet August meeting made special by the mare’s presence. At odds prohibitive to most — though three punters put $10,000 on her at the $1.26 — Winx strolled to victory.
Bowman parked her second, on sprinter Rebel Dane’s rump, with Hartnell following. Entering the straight, motionless in contrast to a feverish Tommy Berry on Rebel Dane, Bowman let Winx ease to the lead, and, with a shake of the reins, she skipped clear, her rider aware only of the wind in his ears and four hooves thudding on the grass. They were three and a half lengths clear on the line. It was yet another kind of special moment in Bowman’s relationship with her.
‘Usually there are horses around me and I’ve got something to run down. But today, because I had the better of Rebel Dane at the 300, it was just me and her,’ said Bowman afterwards. ‘I don’t think she’s been as quick under me as she was today when I let her go. When she let down, it was a special feeling. I’m looking forward to feeling it again.’
Enjoying his own different kind of let-down, Waller was asked if he could put into words what it’s like to train a champion.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can put it into tears, but not words.’
This time, though, he held it together, relieved and reassured as he looked ahead.
‘That is the heats of the Olympics over and done with, and we just have the semi-final and final to come,’ he said. ‘It is a relief. She is in for a massive preparation. We haven’t been too hard on her and she’s had a couple of soft trials, so sometimes it’s hard to tell where they are. I thought she was ready, but you don’t know until raceday.
‘We do have the confidence that all she has to do is turn up as the same horse each start and she is going to normally win. You do need a bit of luck in running as well, and then making sure there’s not an up-and-comer coming through the ranks, and that will happen.
‘There will be some hard-luck stories during her career, but we just need to remember to enjoy it.’
While a time of 1:23.83 minutes was nothing special, Winx again showed her finishing powers by cracking the 33-second barrier for her last 600 metres, her time of 32.68 bettered only on the day by speedster Southern Legend in the 1000-metre final race.
Hartnell came second in his usual distinctive style — head held high, figuratively and literally. All agreed he’d be a more formidable rival over a longer distance, like the extra 640 metres of the Cox Plate. They wouldn’t see each other again till that grand final day.
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In a treat for racing lovers, Winx was starting to revive some of the effects that arose during the career of the wonder they’d been spoiled to see — and only a few years before — in Black Caviar. On top of the awe over her physical performance, now came the poring over stats, the scrambling for the record books. For the first time, among a memorable few, Winx was about to evoke a statistical comparison to the horse most modern racegoers hold as the yardstick.
There were some fans old enough to have seen the mighty Bernborough in the 1940s; more who saw Tulloch before he finished in 1961. But for the majority in 2016, the greatest they’d seen was a no contest: Kingston Town.
‘The Black Horse’ without doubt went past champion status and into the ‘freak’ category. Tommy Smith’s breathtaking gelding, who like Winx was blessed not with size or stride but with incredible powers of acceleration, won thirty of forty-one starts before his retirement in 1982, and was Australia’s first $1-million winner. He won from 1200 metres to 3200 metres, including in one single preparation, and claimed fourteen Group 1 victories.
He won three Cox Plates.
It was impossibly hard. No other horse had done it.
The King had also held a modern winning-streak record of eleven on the trot, the longest Australia had seen since Bernborough’s fifteen straight, and it stood untouched for three decades until Black Caviar came along.
Winx’s attempt at eleven was ordained to be the Group 2 Chelmsford Stakes, over 1600 metres, two weeks after the Warwick Stakes. It would be another tussle, over an extra furlong, with Hartnell. But heavy rain deluged Sydney in the week of the race. Despite sizeable promotions around Winx’s appearance, Waller moved into cautionary mode and scratched her.
Though she’d been proven on bog tracks, the fear was a tough run on a heavy Randwick this early in a busy campaign might take an edge off that would be hard to recover. Horses can be flattened for a preparation by giving too much in an early ‘gut buster’. Besides, Waller had planned for a possible five-start spring — the Warwick Stakes over 1400 metres, the Chelmsford two weeks later over 1600 metres, the George Main Stakes over 1600 metres two weeks after that, the 2000-metre Caulfield Stakes three weeks later, and finally, two weeks after that, the 2040-metre Cox Plate. This program left room for the possibility that one race could be dropped without compromising Winx’s physical progression through the distances.
Waller might not have been so calm about the Winx-less Chelmsford he witnessed, however. Hartnell won. By almost eight lengths!
It was only a six-horse field, with Preferment and three-year-old Prized Icon the main opposition, but the way the brawny, white-faced bay bullocked clear, all arrogance with head raised and ears pricked, left no doubt this was an arresting win. He could have won by 10 lengths if not eased up.
‘He’s in for a great campaign,’ said his jockey, James McDonald. ‘He’s strengthened up, he’s a proper horse, he’s walking around relaxed, he’s travelling spot on.’
While the Hartnell camp went off to plot a path away from Winx towards Moonee Valley, Waller kept his mare in trim with another barrier trial, where she came third of nine under Bowman at Warwick Farm. She would then chase eleven straight at the top level, in the 1600-metre George Main Stakes at Randwick, almost a month after her first-up run.
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As she prepared to match Kingston Town’s winning streak, Winx was also drawing comparisons to another ‘black’. She would go into the George Main at $1.09, a level known simply as ‘Black Caviar odds’. In fact, she would outdo that mare on the odds board to become the shortest-priced favourite in a Sydney Group 1 in fifty-five years. Eclipsing the $1.14 at which Black Caviar had started in her two T.J. Smith Stakes victories, Winx would be at the tightest quote for a Sydney major since Valerius took the 1961 Chipping Norton Stakes at $1.03, against just two other starters. (For the record, the Chipping Norton, a Principal Race in the 1960s, was a Group 2 at the advent of the new grading system in 1978, and became a Group 1 in 1986.)
Also like in the dizzying era of Black Caviar, there was a major press conference in the early hours at Rosehill, after Winx’s final trackwork session the Wednesday before her race. After Waller and Bowman spoke — scotching suggestions her missed race would affect her fitness for this one — there was still an appetite for more, and Debbie Kepitis was presented to provide the Winx-hungry pack an owner’s perspective.
‘She sounded great,’ Kepitis said, after the solo 1000-metre gallop. ‘It’s great when you’re here and you can hear her breath and you can hear her feet — it’s just the best feeling.’
Kepitis was growing used to media exposure. She was now known for her lucky outfit, and the fresh purple streak in her hair. She was also growing used to the pleasure, and the pain, so few people experience in the rarefied atmosphere of owning an otherworldly racehorse.
‘It’s huge,’ she said of the pressure. ‘You’ve got a lot of people banking on this horse now, and . . . you just worry. You hope. I know that she can do it, and I know she’s the type of horse that gives her all, so you just hope that everything goes right on the day.’
Though from a racing family used to success, Kepitis said that, like Peter and Patty Tighe and Richard Treweeke, she was now at the stage of pinching herself every day.
‘It’s the greatest ride of my life,’ she said. ‘You get once-in-a-lifetime horses. I’ve been lucky enough to be part of others, but this is my once-in-a-lifetime horse and I’m taking every moment.’
Some moments will have been anxious ones for the not-quite-nerveless Kepitis, especially those forty minutes before Winx stepped out the following Saturday. In the race before the George Main Stakes, Hartnell had another hit-out in the 2000-metre Hill Stakes, a distance matching the Cox Plate’s. Starting at $1.45, in a six-horse field, he won again. By almost six lengths.
‘The question had to be asked,’ wrote Ray Thomas in the Daily Telegraph, ‘what would have happened if Hartnell was racing Winx?’
Godolphin’s trainer John O’Shea gave it some thought before answering diplomatically, ‘They both would have had hard runs.’7
Thankfully for all in Team Winx, while the gelding looked a hard act to follow, the mare didn’t fluff her lines. In another six-horse field, including last-start Group 2–winner Hauraki, Winx settled in the last two, with Bowman content to sit quietly until the 500. He released the brakes, and Winx strode up as the widest runner around the turn, easing past the gallant Hauraki under hands-and-heels riding to win by 1.3 lengths.
While ostensibly less dominant than Hartnell’s win, it was still as effortless a Group 1 win as you would see — and to equal an all-time-great’s record of eleven straight wins to boot.
Waller said the relatively small winning margin, particularly when compared with Hartnell’s, was no concern, since Winx was being brought along steadily towards more important assignments. ‘Today’s win wasn’t a gap job; it wasn’t intended to be either, as she’s had four weeks between runs,’ he said. ‘We just need to know where she is, plus we needed to win here as there are bigger targets.’
Bowman returned to scale, saying Winx had ‘felt’ the run after her unscheduled lengthy break from racing, but that the bar would be raised as she headed south.
‘She’s beaten inferior opposition today,’ he said, ‘but there is going to be nowhere to hide when we get to Melbourne.’