WINX HAD COMMANDED ATTENTION. Now she demanded examination, a higher level of analysis afforded precious few. No longer was it simply enough that she was so good; the question started being asked as to why.
It was hard to explain by looking at her. She was no monster, a mare of average height (16.1 hands), width and chest cavity — the space where an extraordinary heart might be contained. Phar Lap was found to have a heart nearly twice as large as average, which pumped blood rapidly through his imposing frame.
He also stood well above average height at 17.1 hands, which enabled a massive stride length of 8.2 metres. Bernborough had a maximum stride length of 8.6 metres. Black Caviar, only 16.2 hands high but with a huge and muscular physique, could hit 8.42 metres; it would take only a few such strides for her to put a race to bed.
Winx’s stride was above the thoroughbred average of 6.1 metres, but still only measured around 6.8 metres. So what was her secret?
University of Auckland physicist Dr Graeme Putt had conducted research on Phar Lap and American champion Secretariat. In 2013, he wrote a research paper to explain Black Caviar’s supremacy with physics.1 Again, surprisingly soon after that great mare, he was called on for the key to Winx.
After carefully analysing footage of the mare, he concluded that it wasn’t her stride length. In the Ryder, Le Romain and Chautauqua had averaged some 6.88 metres to Winx’s 6.76 metres. Rather, it was the frequency. Winx’s was far higher than most, at 170 strides per minute compared to the average of 140.
‘Many think the biggest strider automatically wins the race,’ Dr Putt told the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘This arises from the fact sensational sprinters like Black Caviar and athlete Usain Bolt had huge strides. However, the largest stride length does not win a race. Winx reveals an anomalous ability to quicken stride and sustain it to the finish in a way that increases steeply as the race proceeds. Jockey Bowman is sitting astride a freak galloper with a stride rate and range capability that surprises.
‘She can settle near the rear, work her way forward, then accelerate like a rocket and steam home towards the finish and win.’2
According to Dr Putt, Winx had an extraordinary ability to increase her stride frequency exponentially as the race neared its finish, when most horses tire, or, at best, increase it only slightly. When rivals were struggling to maintain a rate of twelve strides every five seconds near the end of a race, Dr Putt found Winx could quicken hers to fourteen.
It was noted how, like Black Caviar, Winx ‘flattened out’ more than other gallopers when hitting top gear, dropping more at the wither, or shoulders, than most. This helped explain her ability to increase what was termed her ‘whippy stride’, an offshoot of what Waller described as an almost feline physique.
‘With her I see a more cat, or lever-based, animal — almost like a leopard,’ Waller said. ‘She has these long back legs, which have an amazing reach that extend forward and back. That seems to be a lot of her driving power.
‘She’s an athlete. She doesn’t look like she’s doing it any easier than any other horse; she just does it more effectively.’3
Just as Winx could increase her stride frequency at will, she could also decrease it, making it easier for her to settle in optimum positions, or slow down to avoid trouble and then, importantly, quickly regain speed, as she had done after striking interference on the home turn in her Doncaster Mile triumph.
‘The extraordinary ability Winx has is her ability to change stride length and frequency at will, that her current rivals don’t have,’ Dr Putt said.4
But there was still a ‘How?’ For this, the science came back to that ‘freak’ argument, that she was the high point of refining the breed to produce the near-perfect horse.
‘It boils down to her anatomy and physiology. In other words, the structure of her heart, her blood system and her muscles,’ said Dr David Evans, a world-renowned Australian equine exercise physiologist. ‘She has to be built with the right muscle structure, she has to have the right amount of muscle relative to her body weight, and she has to have the right type of muscle fibres. Not all muscle fibres are the same, and she has to have the right mix of muscle fibres to enable her to sprint.’5
That was what went into the making of Winx.
As for the training of her, again, there was a comparison to be made from the recent past. As the tension heightened ahead of the Queen Elizabeth Stakes, Black Caviar’s trainer Peter Moody articulated what Waller was going through, perhaps better than Waller himself could at the time.
As for the training of her, again, there was a comparison to be made from the recent past. As the tension heightened ahead of the Queen Elizabeth Stakes, Black Caviar’s trainer Peter Moody articulated what Waller was going through, perhaps better than Waller could himself at the time.
Now that Winx had achieved greatness, Moody said, the pressure on her trainer from a public simply expecting her to turn up and win was ‘quite overwhelming’.
‘Publicly, you are always positive and outwardly always putting that vibe out there. But inwardly, it chews you up,’ Moody said in an interview with sports website ESPN. ‘It’s all about the fear of failure, really. And like any football or cricket coach, sporting manager, or racehorse trainer, if anything ever goes wrong, Chris is the one who’s going to get kicked to death. Not the owners, not the horse, not the jockey. It’s going to be Chris.’
Moody praised Waller for how he’d managed Winx amid those pressures. He also knew from personal experience that Waller would have had to ensure owners with other horses in his large stable did not start feeling their gallopers were suffering a lack of attention beside the stable’s superstar.
‘Black Caviar was actually bad for business,’ said Moody, looking back calmly in retirement. ‘No one wanted to invest big into my stable, because they didn’t feel that they would be a priority. I actually had people remove horses from my care because they felt they weren’t number one.’
Moody said Waller might not realise the extent of the issues — the upsides and downsides — of training a wonder horse until Winx finished racing, saying that when he retired Black Caviar ‘it felt like the Sydney Harbour Bridge had lifted from my shoulders’.
For all the stress, though, Moody reckoned Waller wouldn’t swap his dream ride for anything.
‘It’s all worth it. It’s worth the pain in the arse,’ Moody said. ‘As I said often at the time, I’m glad it was my pain in the arse and not someone else’s.’6
***
While Sydney’s rain began to ease before the Queen Elizabeth, with Winx now considered the surest of certainties for the last start of her preparation, the money poured in for her at unprecedented levels.
The New South Wales TAB opened her at $1.08 early in the week of the race, before trying to entice some interest at $1.10. That lured one big punter into a bet of $75,000, for a potential win of $7500.
That was small fry. When the TAB tempted bettors once more on race eve by dangling a hook that read $1.12, another punter took the bait, plunging $300,000 on Winx for a potential win of $36,000.
The TAB quickly shortened her back to $1.08, but still the big bets came: $14,000, $9000, $6000. Not keen to take the short odds on Winx winning, one punter put $10,000 on her old whipping boy Hartnell to run a place at $1.50. And this was just the activity on the NSW TAB alone.
Winx was breaking all sorts of moulds. With the question not if she’d win but by how much, agencies took bets on her winning margin. Sportsbet, having offered $3.50 that Winx would traverse the autumn unbeaten two months earlier, announced they would pay out on it the day before the Queen Elizabeth, with $241,290 going out to the more than 2600 punters who’d taken the odds. Betting agencies were already advertising their odds for Winx winning a third Cox Plate, six months down the track.
The media ventured up various avenues to keep the pre-race interest bubbling. Much focus centred on the race for second — worth a whopping $760,000 — and whether Hartnell, ridden this time by Godolphin’s English jockey James Doyle, would again be the one staring at the distant rump of his bête noire at the end. Though prizemoney had been allocated down to tenth place, Winx’s presence had led to a nine-horse field. There was $30,000 on offer for whoever managed to come in last.
One media outlet examined Bowman’s relationship with Winx, not in emotional terms but cold, hard dollars and cents.7 Gaining the jockeys’ usual five per cent share of prizemoney, Bowman had to that point earned $396,447 on Winx. The report added cheekily that, having ridden her in races for a combined total of around thirty minutes, Bowman had earned $13,215 per minute on her, meaning he was getting an hourly rate of $792,000. All going according to plan, his $117,000 slice of the Queen Elizabeth first prize would take his earnings on Winx past the half-million-dollar mark. Not bad for the boy from Dunedoo, whose wife, Christine, reflected on the way Winx had utterly changed life in the Bowman household, which now also included two little daughters, Bambi and Paige.
‘I wake up some mornings and look at him and say, “Is this really happening to us?”’ she said. ‘Never in our wildest dreams did we think it could happen, especially so soon after Black Caviar.’8
On a sunny April day, with the track a soft 7, a whopping 26,801 fans crowded into Randwick — a record since the opening of its new grandstand in 2013 — to see the great mare, with hundreds wearing Winx caps and waving matching flags. One man present that day was the octogenarian Treweeke, who’d decided he had to witness this big moment in person.
Winx would eventually start at $1.12. The race for second, or the ‘real race’ as many called it, was dominated by Hartnell at $18, with Happy Clapper at $20 and Lloyd Williams’ quality galloper The United States at $41.
If there was one sliver of doubt for punters, a dim ray of hope for bookies, it was the reputation of the Queen Elizabeth Stakes as a graveyard for odds-on favourites. Nine of the previous sixteen such contestants had been toppled, including It’s A Dundeel at $1.28 in 2013, and the mighty Sunline at $1.50 in 1999. The dishonour roll added to Debbie Kepitis’ usual pre-race nerves, since her father’s star Lonhro was another member — a distant second in 2004 at $1.26 in his final start. Another Ingham family giant, Octagonal, had also been upset in the race at his last start, coming second as 11-8 favourite.
‘I came here today thinking about it,’ Kepitis said. ‘It was a hoodoo that got two horses Dad owned. Both times I was crushed.’9
Kepitis looked to the starting gates on the Alison Road side as the field loaded, hoping Winx would again prove that hoodoos, graveyards and the like were trivialities that did not apply to her.
From barrier three, Bowman settled in midfield, content to park three-wide as long shot No Doubt led at an even pace ahead of The United States and Hartnell. Doyle tried a bold tactic on Hartnell, making an early move by pushing to the leader’s side at the 800 and shooting for home at the 600. If he was trying to pinch a break on Winx, it was futile. Bowman took the mare wide around The United States turning for home. In a style now customary, but no less breathtaking, she cruised to Hartnell under her own steam to take the lead just inside the 400. Fans started applauding, and sat back to bear witness again.
Bowman shook her up inside the 300 and she exploded, again. A flick of the whip at the 200 ensured a gap of five and a quarter lengths when the bell was rung on this pummelling, in what would be ranked the world’s sixth-best race for 2017. Hartnell gallantly held on after his early dash for his fourth second-placing to the mare.
Winx had last been beaten in the Australian Oaks of 2015. No one would have envisaged then the statistics she’d have accumulated by the same meeting two years later.
With seventeen straight wins she was now behind only Ajax’s eighteen, the nineteen of Gloaming and Desert Gold, and Black Caviar’s twenty-five. Her twelfth Group 1 put her just one behind Sunline and Tie The Knot’s thirteen. She’d passed Sunline to be second among Australasian stakes-earners, her $12,708,930 behind only Makybe Diva’s $14,526,690.
Winx’s march was unstoppable. Inexorable. In a way it had become routine, though in no sense monotonous.
‘Just look at her,’ Bowman enthused post-race, after a delighted Treweeke had the honour of leading her in. ‘She’s a supreme athlete, she’s the ultimate professional. I love her, and I could really feel the crowd’s love for her. I don’t whip her too often, but I wanted that supreme effort today, the grand final, and when I gave her one she extended again.’
A relieved Waller spoke of the pressure Winx had again lifted from him, and again — despite all available evidence — he maintained her streak would eventually end. ‘She’ll get beaten one day, but she’ll bounce back.’
But Waller, articulate through his emotions this time, summed up the effect of Winx beautifully.
‘She is doing great things for the sport,’ he said, ‘and people will remember her for the rest of their lives.’