THE DAUGHTER OF STREET cry and Vegas Showgirl spent her early months growing under O’Brien’s watchful eye in the Hunter Valley. She had beautiful colouring — bay, or reddish-brown, with a bay’s requisite black ‘points’, or lower legs. She was a little light in the limbs but had the much-sought commodity of a generous, intelligent eye, and that distinguishing spunk. Moreover, she was starting to display, to seasoned watchers, a characteristic even more precious: she was a good mover.
It’s a quality somewhat hard to define. Bart Cummings once advised his young son and future trainer Anthony that to get a sense of how good horses move it was best to just ‘go and watch a weight-for-age field parading before a race’. Trainer Peter Moody was similarly taken with how the yearling Black Caviar sashayed around the sales ring, his eye taken by such elements as ‘overstep’ — how far in front of her fore hoofprint her hind hoof touched down.
O’Brien, who had been present for Winx’s birth, recalled she was a noticeably energetic foal. ‘I looked up my notes on her . . . and the whole way through was that she had an incredible action,’ he said later. She was ‘leggy, light and elegant’ — O’Brien called her a ‘supermodel-type’ at the time, not so much for being drop-dead gorgeous, but because she was 90 per cent legs. Still, she had a decent frame to grow into. Also, her calm temperament shone.1
Before long, the filly would have to part from her mother, and her breeders, for good.
***
John Camilleri has been asked a million times if he wishes he’d held on to this one. After all, he’s kept several horses he’s bred, like One Last Dance, A Time For Julia, and Winx’s younger half-brother, El Divino.
But business has taught Camilleri not to live with regrets about what can’t be changed. It’s also taught him that business is business.
‘Winx was a lovely weanling, a lovely yearling, and I must admit I thought long and hard about keeping her but, as I say, you can’t keep them all,’ he said in an interview. ‘I think a lot of people miss the factors involved in breeding racehorses. You have enormous overheads, like ongoing agistment fees, very expensive service fees, and those that you do keep and race, that’s not cheap at all. If you want to breed a very good horse, well, keep them all and don’t sell them, but that’s expensive.’2
That said, there may have been some regrets — not because baby Winx was sold, but when. At the Magic Millions yearling sale on the Gold Coast in January 2013, Winx, then known as Lot 329, sold for $230,000. It’s a decent amount of money, considering Vegas Showgirl was an unproven dam, though it was some way short of the $565,000-plus that had gone into making the filly.
O’Brien, who decided on the venue for her sale among a Coolmore draft of yearlings, still has slight misgivings.
‘I made the mistake; she should have gone to Easter,’ he said, referring to Sydney’s premier sale, which would have allowed the youngster a few more months to develop. ‘At the Magic Millions she was still all leg and lacked a bit of substance. It was just maturity. She would have been better at a later sale.’3
It will go down as a very minor bugbear indeed, if it’s remembered at all.
Waiting on the other side of the sales ring were a team of caring owners, a bloodstock agent with a keen eye for horses, and a patient, meticulous master trainer.
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Guy Mulcaster is a good horseman from good horse country — New Zealand — with an unsurpassed reputation in Australia and abroad as a canny judge of a thoroughbred. Having been in the training game for a handful of years, he’s now one of the most respected bloodstock agents in Australasia, casting his eye over yearlings for prospective buyers and trainers.
He’s forged an especially strong partnership with one trainer in particular — a Sydney-based compatriot who built his business up from nothing to become not just one of Australia’s most successful trainers but a phenomenon himself. His name is Chris Waller.
Waller grew up on a dairy farm near Foxton, a town of not quite three thousand people on New Zealand’s North Island. With a grandfather and uncle involved with racing and breeding, Waller would milk his family farm’s cows on many a Saturday so his father, John, could attend the races. The farm gave Waller the building blocks for his later life. ‘They are all animals, cows and horses; I learnt a lot on the dairy farm,’ he once said.4
Still, like any self-respecting young Kiwi, Waller played rugby and dreamed of being an All Black. But, with Waller realising the All Blacks wouldn’t come knocking, horses soon took over. He learned to ride and gained a place as a stablehand with esteemed local trainer Paddy Busuttin.
‘I wasn’t very good at rugby,’ Waller would say later. ‘I was amazed by horses. I remember strapping them — when you take them to races and look after them — and thought how good it was, how important you felt.’5
From early on, Busuttin was impressed with the shy young Waller’s work ethic. ‘He was very conscientious. Very particular and meticulous, even from day one. He’d have his notebook out of his pocket, taking things down. He was so intent on learning,’ he said.6
When still only eighteen, fate, mixed with this work ethic, combined to deal Waller a card that would prove a major influence on his life.
‘A girl was meant to bring two horses over to Sydney for Paddy and she pulled out at the last minute. Fortunately, I had a passport and Paddy asked if I would like to go,’ said the kid from Foxton. ‘It was just amazing. I didn’t know much about life. I still remember peeping through the cracks in the horse plane. I clearly remember all the tiled roofs and thought, “Wow, look at this place.’”7
Taking the five-year-old Plume for a tilt at the Rosehill Group 1, now known as the Coolmore Classic, and another, less-illustrious mare named Our Secret Sand along for the ride, Waller had his eyes opened, and his imagination fired. He rode work at Randwick, enthralled by seeing the likes of Bart Cummings, and Gai Waterhouse’s legendary father, Tommy Smith. While Plume finished down the track in the Coolmore — won by Graeme Rogerson’s Skating — Our Secret Sand scored a victory at Canterbury, setting a course record for the 1560-metre journey to boot.
‘I thought, “How good is this? I have ridden work at Randwick, strapped a runner in the Coolmore, and had a winner at Canterbury,”’ he’d later recall.8
Waller impressed Busuttin enough that he was also put in charge of perhaps his finest-ever horse, the six-time Group 1 winning stayer Castletown, on subsequent missions across the Tasman. Then, when Busuttin moved to Singapore to train in 1997, it was a natural progression for Waller, still only twenty-four, to strike out on his own.
More trips to Australia followed in the late 1990s, and they brought more rewards. Waller’s mare Party Belle won six races on two separate campaigns, including two at Randwick. Waller had the taste for the Australian turf.
In April 2000, Waller received a call from authorities at Rosehill racecourse about a new stabling area. He assured them he’d have enough horses for the twenty boxes on offer, and left for Sydney. It was an early example of him biting off more than he could chew, and chewing like mad. He didn’t quite have twenty horses. He had four. But before long he began nimbly pulling strings and had soon filled every box.
Still, his early years in Sydney were far from an instant success. Waller had arrived with very little except those four gallopers and one maxed-out credit card, to which he soon added another. Thankfully for him, he also had the love of his life.
Stephanie Titcombe also grew up in Foxton. She went to the same high school as Waller, Manawatu College, where their parents had also been educated. But it wasn’t until years after they’d left school that they would meet, fittingly, on a day at the races — the story going that Waller was smitten by watching Stephanie sing the national anthem.
The future Mrs Waller had studied music on leaving school, and later became the singer in a band named Hokio. While the group travelled internationally, far bigger things came for Stephanie from the other passion she pursued: modelling. After winning the regional beauty contest to be crowned Miss Horowhenua in 1996, and placing third in the Miss New Zealand pageant, Stephanie was signed by a prestigious New York modelling agency. This launched an international career, including considerable work in Germany and Japan, which put her on the front cover of many fashion magazines.
When she and Chris crossed the Tasman together, Stephanie’s modelling work would prove crucial. During their first three or four years in Sydney, while the young trainer tried to establish himself, the couple could not afford a car. Chris would hitch rides to the races with jockeys, horse-truck drivers, anyone. Chris and Stephanie would often stay on friends’ floors until they could finally afford a rental flat, which they filled with second-hand furniture.
‘We weren’t living off bread and butter, but we were living from rent to rent, week to week,’ said Stephanie,9 whose modelling work, mostly in Japan, would cover the couple’s rent.
‘She certainly contributed more than I did in the early days,’ her husband says. ‘All I was doing was paying the [stable staff] wages. I couldn’t get an overdraft, I couldn’t borrow any money, so I had to make every week pay. I had to work long hours for the sake of having less staff.’10
Finally, more and more results started to come the way of the likeable young trainer. That led to more horses and, as he could afford them, more staff. The couple eventually married, back home in Foxton, in 2005.
With his rare ability, Waller continued to make his way, rebounding from the equine influenza outbreak that brought racing to a standstill in 2007 to train his first Group 1 winner when Triple Honour took out Randwick’s Doncaster Handicap the following autumn.
From his somewhat unfashionable Rosehill base — Randwick has long been regarded Sydney’s place to be — the trainer continued to grow his business until, in 2012, he smashed the established order of Gai Waterhouse and Peter Snowden by winning the trainers’ premiership. A year later, he broke Tommy Smith’s 37-year-old Sydney wins record, with 167.5 winners to Smith’s 156. His premiership-winning sequence would stretch to eight in succession by the end of the 2017–18 season.
Waller would become known as a sensitive soul and a thoughtful interview subject who, unlike the stereotypical hard-bitten trainers of another era, was not above shedding a tear if ever asked to look back on his successes. When once asked why, he said, ‘It’s because I did it so tough in the early days.’11
With the support of his wife and two children, Tyler and Nikita — to whom he strictly devotes ‘no racing’ Sundays, when he usually likes to stay at home cooking — Waller has become a giant of training worldwide.
‘He’s just so dedicated, motivated,’ Stephanie says. ‘He inspires me to get up in the morning. He works hard. I knew he was going to [succeed] — but not to this level.’12
Apart from training future stars, Waller also became a major force in the business of picking them out, together with his friend and compatriot Mulcaster. In Lot 329, at the 2013 Magic Millions sale, they had a prospect, and a trio of clients in mind.
***
Debbie Kepitis had a rich pedigree herself in owning horses. Coincidentally, given John Camilleri’s involvement in Winx, it traces back to chickens. Kepitis is the youngest daughter of Bob Ingham. Together with his brother, Jack, he built not only the eponymous poultry empire that forever tagged them as ‘the Chicken Kings’, but also Australia’s largest thoroughbred breeding and racing business. This included the Woodlands Stud in the Hunter Valley and Crown Lodge at western Sydney’s Warwick Farm racecourse, with a team of gallopers prepared by experienced trainer John Hawkes. Shockwaves went around the racing world when the empire was sold in 2008 for around half a billion dollars to — that man again — Sheikh Mohammed and his Darley/Godolphin enterprises.
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Soon afterwards, Bob Ingham went looking for a new trainer to condition a few horses he’d bought to ‘have some fun’.13 He sent them to a young man he liked the look of, Chris Waller, and a new family connection began.
Livewire Kepitis is the mother of three grown daughters (Alinta, Lara and Talia), a grandmother, and the wife of Paul Kepitis, who’s usually seen by her side on course. Far bigger in personality than in height (she’s shorter than most jockeys), she’s a confident, down-to-earth yet highly superstitious racing businesswoman, one with a constant twinkle in her eye and who wears her heart on her sleeve. She grew up in Sydney in a world of quality horseflesh, the likes of Octagonal and his most famous son, Lonhro, carrying the Inghams’ famed all-cerise colours. She ventured into thoroughbred ownership herself, with clearly defined ideals.
‘Enter with dreams but make sure you enjoy every step along the way — from horse selection, naming, trial, race start, et cetera,’ she would say. ‘Luck plays a big part in the industry, so make the most of it when it comes your way.’14
As an Ingham family scion, it might have seemed ownership was inevitable for Kepitis, but her first venture came almost by accident. At a racing-related charity function in 2006, Kepitis was the successful bidder on a rare auction item — a year’s worth of training by racing giant Lee Freedman, in Melbourne.
‘I bid $35,000 and ended up with it. The only problem was we didn’t have a horse to send down. It was the last time I’ve had an alcoholic drink at a function like that,’ she’d later recall with her trademark hearty laugh.15
A horse was duly ‘found’, with Kepitis and husband Paul going to Sydney’s Easter yearling sales and doing something that would be fatefully echoed in future years — buying a filly for $230,000. By the successful sire Danzero out of a mare called Campbell Fever, the filly was named Woppitt, after the mascot teddy bear Sir Donald Campbell took with him in his land-speed record pursuits. Raced in partnership with the couple’s eldest daughters, Alinta and Lara, Woppitt won five races, all at city level in Melbourne and Adelaide, from twenty-four starts for a quarter of a million dollars prizemoney, before retiring in 2010. When she founded her own bloodstock company, Debbie Kepitis didn’t have to think hard about a name — Woppitt Bloodstock.
Soon after Woppitt was purchased, Kepitis was part of an all-female syndicate that bought a chestnut colt called Perchance. As chance would have it, the horse wasn’t all that good, winning just two of twenty starts. It might even have inspired Kepitis’ steadfast aversion to chestnuts, which would play a role in the later purchase on the Gold Coast of the all-bay Lot 329. But what it also did was bring her into contact with a Brisbane co-owner named Patty Tighe.
Husband-and-wife team Peter and Patty Tighe own racing concern Magic Bloodstock. Before meeting his wife, Peter Tighe had built himself up, with dedication and savvy business acumen, in the fruit and vegetable business. Tall, affable, and mixing a reputation for hard work with the nature of a proverbial laid-back Queenslander, Tighe followed his father Kevin into a career at Brisbane’s Rocklea Markets, eventually taking over as chief executive of major produce firm J.H. Leavy. (The business was bought by New Zealand’s Global Fresh for an undisclosed sum in 2016, but Tighe stayed on as C.E.O.) Success in business had provided a path into thoroughbred ownership, while Tighe was also a director of the old Brisbane Turf Club, before its merger with the Queensland Turf Club to form the Brisbane Racing Club in 2007.
For the best part of two decades, Magic Bloodstock had raced many gallopers, starting out by owning horses that raced in Singapore, then branching out closer to home. All the Tighes’ horses had ‘Magic’ in their names, but, like Perchance, most weren’t all that good either. In another brush with racing’s fates, their best one, Make Mine Magic — winner of almost a million dollars prizemoney — ran a close fourth in Eagle Farm’s prestigious Stradbroke Handicap in 2001, as Ingham pair Crawl and Hire took first and second. Though firmly gripped by the excitement of ownership, Peter Tighe wondered if he’d ever be blessed by rare success like a handful of owners such as Tony Santic, who’d raced the great Makybe Diva in the early 2000s.
‘You dreamt what it would be like to be a Tony Santic,’ he once said. ‘Not in an envious way, but just wondering whether that could ever happen.’16
In 2011, the Tighes and Kepitis teamed up to buy a son of Lonhro for around $250,000. It raced as Loophole, under the banners of Magic Bloodstock and Woppitt Bloodstock. Loophole was trained by Waller and proved handy enough, the gelding winning eight races, seven in Sydney, and almost half a million dollars.
By the start of 2013, the Tighes and Kepitis had decided to go again. With them would be the wild card of the syndicate, a retired grazier, octogenarian and out-and-out character named Richard Treweeke, who had raced horses with the Tighes before.
Racing was in Treweeke’s blood. An older relative, George Treweeke, raced formidable early-1960s mare Maidenhead, whose wins included the Sydney Cup, Tancred Stakes and the Chipping Norton Stakes. Another distant relative, Jean Treweeke, was married to a part-owner of one of the original ‘people’s horses’, Gunsynd, in the 1970s. The man’s name was Germaine McMicking, but, in a barely known twist bordering on the bizarre, he was universally known by a nickname: ‘Winks’.17
Richard Treweeke had more than been through the mill. As a teenager, he was forced from the family farm near Bourke when his father died in a car accident. He became a jackeroo, eventually reaching another family farm near Orange, but a family dispute led him to abandon that and move to the big smoke of Sydney in 1950.
In a tangential move, Treweeke (known as ‘Dick’ by his mates back in Orange) started selling ads for Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited in Surry Hills, then switched to outdoor advertising. He did well enough to buy into racehorses, but will also admit — perhaps with some understatement — that none of them were any good. Asked in a TV interview once what most of his horses were like, Treweeke shot back a one-word answer in his classic bushman’s drawl: ‘Ordinary!’18
Possessed with a ready wit and a sparkling pair of eyes hinting strongly at mischief, Treweeke had by 2013 become used to indulging his passion for racing from the comfort of his lounge room in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman. He was eighty-two, and the occasional bout of vertigo had restricted his trips to the races, and most other travel. He did proudly say, however, that while he’d been a city man for several decades, he still made the walk to his local newsagent once a week to buy the bushie’s favoured journal, The Land.19
Through five spirit-sapping decades of horse ownership since his first dabble in 1958, Treweeke had never seen one of his horses win a race. Was he finally due at least a little success?
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The Tighes, Kepitis and Treweeke went to the Magic Millions sale with a wish list. They wanted a horse that could hopefully win a Saturday race in Sydney, with versatility over distances, and breeding value post-racing. But they also had their own personal lists of likes and dislikes to tick off — some more scientific than others.
Kepitis admits hers is unconventional: ‘It sounds strange, but I don’t like chestnuts — never have — and I don’t like an even number of socks. I look for a horse that’s observant, that looks straight at you when you approach it. I don’t like too much white on a horse — either socks or face markings. The horse has to look pretty and I like a bit of height.’
She remembered the eye of one of her father’s finest, Lonhro. ‘He’d have this look at the barrier. He’d just stare at you.’20
Not only did the Street Cry yearling satisfy Kepitis, she also fitted Peter Tighe’s and Treweeke’s bills.
‘When I first saw her, I thought she was beautiful,’ Treweeke later recalled. ‘I wasn’t looking at her from the front but from behind. She looked very strong from behind and she walked nicely.’21
Winx could still easily have become the one that got away. While she checked all the boxes, there were three other lots higher on the trio’s shopping list. The bidding on those, however, got a little hot for their original $150,000 budget. Upon missing their third choice, they realised they had to raise their limit or they might miss out.
When Lot 329 emerged at 3.50 pm on the typically hot Gold Coast afternoon of Thursday, 10 January 2013, the syndicate was determined. Yet, when the auction started, there was little hint of the greatness that lay ahead. In fact, if Winx could watch footage of the sale today, she might be positively indignant.
Auctioneer Grant Burns opened proceedings at $100,000. With no takers, he dropped to $80,000. Then fifty. Then forty! Spare change in today’s money.
Finally, a hand was raised, and so to fifty, then quickly through three bids to $80,000. Interest was building, but then came a pause. Finally, a creep to $90,000. Then into six figures, and the blood started rushing — $100,000 ping-ponging in lots of $10,000, quickly to $150,000. With another pause it appeared the sale had been made, but it came to life again, the ante rising in tens, until it stalled again at $200,000. Now it seemed the market had found its level.
Not quite. The trio moved to end it with a bid of $210,000. Their shot was quickly returned. Peter Tighe and Kepitis looked at each other. They nodded, and fired back with $230,000. Finally, the gavel fell.
Oddly, the identity of the underbidders is an enduring mystery in the Winx story. Kepitis reckons three dozen people have told her it was them, yet doubt remains. Perhaps it’s just too hard to talk about this one that got away.
Plenty of horses sold for more at that sale — fifty-nine of them, in fact, with eighteen lots fetching more than $400,000. Top lot was a $1.35-million colt, which raced as Valentia, and won two of his first three races, but didn’t win in five more and was sent to stud. And Lot 329 was only the third-most expensive of the seven Street Cry yearlings at the sale, coming in around the sire’s average that week of $226,000.
Still, the new owners had blown their original budget by $80,000. Such can happen quickly, and without too many nerves, in the thoroughbred world, yet it was a substantial overshoot. Would it be relived as bravery fortune would favour, or an auction ring-rush of blood?
Kepitis, Treweeke and the Tighes sent their new filly to Waller, hoping they’d not been separated from their thousands foolishly.