BILL COLLINS WAS KNOWN as ‘The Accurate One’.
Through decades of racecalling he was renowned for his precise descriptions, his ability to read a race.
But a little like Trevor ‘I Bowled One Underarm’ Chappell, or Ben ‘I Lost One Gold Medal’ Johnson, Collins is eternally remembered for one famous utterance: ‘Kingston Town can’t win.’
It happened in the 1982 Cox Plate, at the 300-metre mark. To be fair, you couldn’t blame Collins. The Black Horse was battling, stuck back in sixth place, his jockey, Peter Cook, furiously wielding the whip. He looked beaten for all money, and, after all, could anyone really have expected victory? He was trying to win a third Cox Plate. Horses just didn’t do that.
As the sagas have recorded, Kingston Town, in fact, could win, and did, sweeping home in the last few strides to score by half a length.
Phar Lap, Hydrogen, Tranquil Star and Tobin Bronze had won the race twice, but not thrice. Sunline was a $2.80 favourite when attempting her hat-trick in 2001, but was undone by Northerly, who later won his second, but not a third.
Even accepting Winx’s different brand of greatness, claiming Australasia’s weight-for-age championship a third time was still an imposing task. In 2005, racing lovers had watched, and hoped, as Makybe Diva tried for an unprecedented third Melbourne Cup. It was a fairy tale surely too much to hope for, yet the super mare took us there.
Only a dozen years later came this chance to be spoiled by witnessing another achievement for the ages. But while Makybe Diva’s feat was laced with terrors — much can go wrong in a 24-horse field over a gruelling 3200 metres — there was a sense that Winx would take this one, as she’d made light of daunting history before, usually with nonchalance.
It was almost ludicrous to think she could be beaten five runs into her campaign, over 2040 metres, at weight-for-age, and having flown over Moonee Valley untroubled twice before. In fact, four days before the race, the Sydney Morning Herald was already salivating — not about the prospect of a third Cox Plate, but about the chance of Winx breaking Black Caviar’s 25-win streak at the following June’s Royal Ascot carnival.
‘I hope the mare does it,’ said Kingston Town’s regular rider Malcolm Johnston, who was aboard for his first Cox Plate, but suspended for his second and third. ‘I’m not saying Winx is better than Kingston Town or Kingston Town is better than Winx. But I hope the mare does it because she’s the best I’ve seen since him. She’s arrogant, she treats her opposition with contempt — and so did he.’1
Winx wasn’t just setting out in another race. This was a chance to be recognised by some markers as the greatest ever. If she could prevail, she would not only match Kingston Town’s treble, and Black Caviar’s fifteen Group 1s, but would become Australasia’s highest stakes-winner, with $15.58 million to Makybe Diva’s $14.52 million.
It was an apt time for reflection for the meticulous Waller on his love for his mare.
‘I see in her a bit of myself,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t need any fuss or anything special, but you just see purpose when she’s being worked with.’
Waller had three months prior won his seventh Sydney premiership. Yet the softly spoken trainer remained less than instantly recognisable, not ‘Bart Cummings famous’. His fame outside racing was growing, but there were still lighter moments, like the dialogue with a fellow passenger from his flight to Melbourne that week:
‘What do you do?’
‘I’m a horse trainer.’
‘Any good horses?’
‘Winx.’
‘And you can see them sit up. “Oh wow. I know Winx,”’ Waller said with a smile.2
Waller was, slowly, becoming more used to recognition. Showing Melbourne’s love of sport, he felt he was recognised more in that city — by ‘maybe five per cent’ of people — than in Sydney, where he put the figure at 2.5 per cent.
‘People might get a laugh when they read this but when you know you are being noticed — and let’s face it, it’s because of Winx — you sort of look around and go, “Gee, that person has noticed me.” You really don’t know how to act. Do you look down or do you acknowledge it? It really does sound silly, but it’s so unfamiliar.’3
By this stage, Winx was never far from the trainer’s mind. His wife, Stephanie, joked in one newspaper interview that her husband was ‘having an affair’ — the other female of course being Winx — adding that if the mare could ‘cook and clean I might lose him altogether’.4
Early in Cox Plate week, Waller reflected that the thought of Winx was ‘always there, simmering away’.
‘Demanding isn’t the right word. But no matter what you’re doing, Winx is there in the background, white noise,’ he said. ‘You’re thinking of Winx like you would be your wedding a month out, or in the same way you would the birth of your first child. She just keeps popping up. Like this week leading into the Cox Plate; you think about it ten times a day. You want the race run now, not in five days’ time, because you want it over.’5
Like Stephanie Waller, Christine Bowman also joked about the other female in husband Hugh’s life.
‘They do have a love affair going on,’ she said. ‘I don’t think she loves any jockey as much as she loves him. And he loves her.’6
And what had Winx come to represent for sport fans dedicated and casual?
Some old-timers interviewed by the media felt she couldn’t stack up against past legends — including former Kingston Town handler Tom ‘Spider’ Barker, who offered a beautifully quintessential ‘racing’ quote that would be much repeated: ‘She hasn’t beaten nothing good.’7
About Black Caviar, too, this was sometimes said. It’s also said that some people would boo Santa Claus.
Like Black Caviar, Winx could only beat what was put in front of her. Everyone was invited. Malcolm Knox, an esteemed commentator on sport and society, provided some gifted prose and perspective in the Sydney Morning Herald. He said that, in a way, Winx’s streak was ‘anti-sport’, since sport was supposed to be about competition. But, as with a tightrope act, the public couldn’t look away. Moreover, Winx was uplifting — nostalgic and often useless comparisons with the past be damned. ‘Maybe what happens today is not inferior to the past,’ Knox wrote. ‘Maybe we are seeing the best ever. What Winx symbolises today is celebrating the present, and also the possibility of purity in a complicated world.’8
***
Winx was scaring rivals away again, but unlike the Turnbull Stakes, the Moonee Valley Racing Club said it would protect the race’s integrity by not allowing lowly rated horses in. Waller said that was the least of his worries. He and Bowman were delighted with Winx’s early-week track gallop at the Valley, when some 300 fans turned out to see her in hushed respect.
‘As she came up the straight, you could have heard a pin drop,’ Waller said. ‘It was quite eerie, but very humbling to see all the people here this morning for her.’
This silent witnessing aside, Melbourne’s sporting public was in a frenzy, as happens nowhere else. They stood five-deep around Winx’s day stall, snapping photos, following the mare’s every move, asking even Debbie Kepitis for autographs. With race betting stagnant, nearly pointless, one bookie had put up $5 odds about Kepitis not wearing her lucky dress on raceday. Of course, it wouldn’t happen.
Another market was framed, by bookmaker Robbie Waterhouse (husband of Gai), for a ‘Field Of Dreams’ Cox Plate comprising fourteen great winners since 1960. Tulloch was $3.50, Kingston Town $5.50, Might And Power $12 and So You Think $13. The favourite, at $3.20, was Winx.9
‘Winx may be the best ever,’ said Waterhouse of the mare who had ‘the quickest stride I’ve ever seen’.10
In the non-fantasy market, there was a chance Winx could emulate Phar Lap again. She was at a seemingly generous $1.15 early in the week, shaping as the shortest-priced favourite since the Red Terror in 1931. If the field ended up especially small, it was possible she might match or better his $1.07 quote in that win.
After one punter bet $106,500 at the $1.15, to potentially win $15,975, one bookmaker, Bluebet’s Michael Sullivan, conceded the price was irrational.
‘It’s a bit of fear and stupidity that keeps her at the $1.15, because you don’t want to be one not to get something out of her if she was to get beaten,’ Sullivan said. ‘She is an out-and-out champion, but like Black Caviar we are hoping to find something to provide the shock of the century.’
Sullivan insisted Winx was beatable. She’d taken a while to win in her Sydney runs of her current campaign, the Valley straight was short, and maybe some rival might try to pinch the race as Red Excitement had done in the Chelmsford Stakes.
‘But,’ he conceded, ‘this will probably make it twenty-two times in a row I have been wrong.’11
When the field was declared there were nine entrants. With the subsequent scratching of Kaspersky, it became the smallest Cox Plate since 2003. There was Humidor again, the equal fifteenth-best horse in the world along with Hartnell, who’d stayed away, with the Melbourne Cup his aim. Happy Clapper was back for another try, with Caulfield Stakes winner Gailo Chop. Would boom colt Royal Symphony be the emerging star to challenge Winx? With his three-year-old’s weight of 49.5 kilograms, he was a $19 second-favourite. Godolphin’s English visitor Folkswood, a last-start easy winner of the Listed Cranbourne Cup, was a dark horse at $26.
As the preparations continued towards the race, Winx’s owners also made their hopeful plans of fully seizing the moment. The Tighes would take an entourage of around thirty family and friends, and Kepitis around fifteen.
‘She is the best mare in the world and as we have gone on this wonderful journey, more and more people have joined us,’ Kepitis said. ‘Winx is a once-in-a-lifetime horse and you want to share it with your family. These are memories and times you want to share.’12
Richard Treweeke, now weeks off turning eighty-seven, would be watching from his sofa.
‘I’ve been feeling a bit giddy and I’ve been falling arse over tit,’ he quipped. ‘A little bit of vertigo, so I won’t be making the trip. I’ve never been to a Cox Plate at Moonee Valley, so I’ll have to watch it on the telly again. I’ll have a glass of champagne pretty soon after [if Winx wins], but I won’t be going out. I’ll finish the bottle, mind you.’13
Looking ahead to the race, Bowman said — frighteningly for her rivals — that Moonee Valley was possibly Winx’s favourite track, for its cambered bends and spongy surface. He said he wouldn’t succumb to overconfidence, but did say the Cox Plate was possibly a more ideal race for the mare than most, since ‘the pressure builds a long way from home and that suits her style of racing’.
‘I have a healthy respect for her rivals,’ he said. ‘But I’m on a supreme athlete and the reality is I just need to stay out of trouble and give her clear galloping room so she can get her chance.’14
Like Waller, Bowman had been probed for his innermost thoughts on being associated with such a horse leading up to her most special assignment. While all rides must be treated the same in many respects — with alertness, calmness — it was also true all horses were not the same.
‘I’ve got seven, eight, sometimes nine rides when she’s racing,’ Bowman said. ‘It allows me to carry on with business as usual.
‘But there’s no question as we get closer to the time of her jumping out of the barriers . . . I wouldn’t say I feel nervous, but there’s a certain aura that’s unavoidable, and as we get closer to post time that becomes stronger and stronger.
‘I wouldn’t call it a burden, but I’ve felt a high level of responsibility for quite some time riding Winx. Up until win fifteen, it wasn’t really a huge priority of mine. Up until winning the Queen Elizabeth, the winning streak wasn’t a priority, but certainly now, this preparation, that’s gone to a new level. The anticipation can’t be avoided and although it’s a high level of responsibility, I feel a great appreciation for the position I’m in. I’m just like everyone else. I just hope everything goes smoothly for her.’15
Still, as Saturday afternoon unfolded amid a build-up that included a TV helicopter following Winx’s short float trip from Waller’s Flemington stables to Moonee Valley, deep in the bowels of the grandstand the occasion’s enormity began to weigh on the man in the pressurised position unknowable to all but a handful of the best jockeys on earth.
‘I had three rides earlier in the day,’ Bowman later recalled. ‘I had a couple of races off and I found it hard to keep myself — keep the mind — at ease, when I had nothing else to do. So I tried to have a rest.’
That helped little, but finally Bowman could revel in his most cherished moment, when he was legged aboard arguably the best horse in the world, and headed to the barriers to ‘absorb the energy that is in this wonderful arena’.
***
Moonee Valley was packed. Heaving. It was long ago sold out, and 32,617 people filled the little amphitheatre, angling for any vantage point. They roared when Winx went through the tunnel and onto the track. And they roared again when the starting gates opened at the top of the straight, like a Colosseum crowd urging the mare to treat them to history.
Bowman duly stayed out of trouble from barrier five, parking fifth, three-wide, turning out of the straight, as Gailo Chop took his customary role in front, ahead of Folkswood. Royal Symphony and jockey Dean Yendall would be tracking Winx. Humidor and Blake Shinn sat last on the fence, seven lengths off the lead.
With the pace strong, the order barely changed until the field turned down the school side, when Folkswood pressured Gailo Chop. But at the 700, the crowd was set alight again. Bowman made his move. He eased Winx four wide, in fourth place. She was quickly within a length of the lead.
‘We’ve waited thirty-five years for this,’ cried caller Matt Hill, revving the throng again.
Winx joined the lead at the 350. Gailo Chop dug in, yet Bowman hadn’t moved. The mare sprinted after her Cox Plate hat-trick with 200 metres left entering the straight, out by two lengths with Bowman urging her to top speed. But while in previous years she’d shot out alone, this day there came a danger.
Humidor had sneaked up inside horses nearing the turn, and it was soon ominously clear, far more than in the Turnbull, that Darren Weir had peaked him for this day. The gelding surged round the leaders, barging Royal Symphony out of the way and building a mighty run.
The stands were at a deafening roar. Humidor drew a length and a half behind Winx at the 150, then only a length at the 100. With Bowman urging hands-and-heels, and Shinn flailing the whip, Humidor drew closer still. With fifty metres to go, he was only half a length behind. Cheers were replaced by shrieks in the stands. Disaster loomed terrifyingly close.
The fear lasted only two strides.
Winx felt Humidor coming, and she extended again. She didn’t pull away, but did enough to hold him. Her most momentous trick of all had been achieved by a long neck.
The great mare had provided a healthy dash of drama — no doubt unhealthy for the man with $106,500 on her. But success of such grand dimensions — a third Cox Plate to match Black Caviar’s fifteen Group 1 wins and become the highest-earning horse in Australasian history — is not remembered by margins. In any case, Bowman wasn’t worried.
‘Full credit to Humidor, but as surprising as it was to see him there, I wasn’t concerned that we were going to be beaten. She had more to give,’ said Bowman, his voice quivering amid the euphoria.
Like a footballer accepting the World Cup, Bowman, the horseman from the bush, fully revelled in the moment. After a flood of blue streamers floated down over the grandstands in tribute, Bowman took Winx on a rapturous victory lap of the home straight and tossed his cap — helmet and all — into the crowd. Finally, he brought her back to scale with both arms raised to the grandstands, as if to embrace and absorb the recognition and acclaim for this ever-to-be-remembered moment in time.
‘She already was one of the greatest horses, but she has just made history here today. To be the only horse other than Kingston Town, the great Kingston Town, who was commonly recognised as possibly the best horse we have seen here in Australia — to emulate his wonderful record all those years ago is very humbling,’ said Bowman, interrupted in his post-race interview by a kiss from his ecstatic wife, Christine, who described this most composed of jockeys as ‘my little cucumber’.
It hadn’t been a gaping margin, but Winx did add one stunning flourish to her masterwork. She’d broken her own track record, her time of 2:02.94 minutes shading the 2:02.98 minutes of her first Plate.
With Kepitis in tears, Peter Tighe jubilant, and Treweeke punching the air at home in Sydney, Waller emerged to take his bow. As could be expected, he’d be not much use for quotes, as his tears flowed on this day of days.
‘Up until this morning . . . it’s been intense,’ he said. The pressure had stopped, he said, when he took his first look at Winx that day, and she was calm and ‘picture perfect’ as usual. Still, in the centre of this historical happening, his release was enormous.
‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever been involved in, and I may not get that opportunity again,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to take it in, but I’ve got to enjoy it and appreciate it as well.’
One week later, Arrogate would fail again, coming fifth of eleven in a Group 1 in the U.S. Yet when the end-of-year rankings came out, Winx was still rated below him, 132 to 134. She was still, officially, the second-best horse in the world.
Try telling that to any of the 32,000-plus fans who packed Moonee Valley, Melbourne, Australia, on 27 October 2017, roaring themselves hoarse as she achieved what was thought unachievable, as the Queen matched the King.