THOUGH BACK AGAINST HER own sex, Winx looked to be facing a more challenging mission in the Vinery Stud Stakes. She’d never raced beyond the 1600 metres of her Flight Stakes defeat the previous spring, so there were unavoidable doubts about rising to 2000 metres. She’d also be resuming battle at set weights — 56 kilograms — with her old nemesis, First Seal.
Waller had nominated Winx for that most prestigious mile of Australian turf, the Doncaster Handicap, where she’d have carried a tantalisingly light impost as a three-year-old filly. Instead, he stuck with the ambitions for which he felt Winx had been built, convinced she was a staying type who should tread an Oaks path. His comments were measured, but it was clear the stable was again thinking big.
‘The one thing I’ll say about Winx is she looks more like a rangy 2000-metre staying type of filly,’ Waller said before the race. ‘She’s in winning form. [The Phar Lap Stakes] might not have been the strongest race, but she did beat the boys.’1
This time, however, the experts were not with the Winx camp. They saw her last start as ‘soft’, in more than one sense — a cushy hit-out against a small and weak field, and no convincing form for the tougher Vinery. Winx was second-favourite, but drifted on raceday from a tight $4 to $5.50, with punters convinced First Seal would continue to dominate this rivalry, backing her from $2 to $1.80.
They got it right. Mostly. Success would again elude Winx that day. But the horse wasn’t the main source of angst in the Vinery. Tommy Berry’s ride arguably cost her a first Group 1.
Jockeys can be judged harshly. The risks they take are unfathomable to most people — steering thoroughbreds at breakneck speed, with little more for a tenuous grip than feet pushing into stirrups, and knees and calves squeezing their half a tonne of horse. They have to battle their finely tuned, often headstrong mounts to deny their instincts to charge ahead, trying to soothe them into settling. Race fields are bunched so tightly, especially in Australia, that an impossible-to-predict false step, a clip by one horse’s hoof onto another can cause disastrous, and fatal, falls.
And when in a race the time of reckoning comes, jockeys take split-second decisions about which way to go. Sometimes it looks like genius. Sometimes, when they’re in form like a master batsman, they don’t even have to think. They just know. And sometimes the wrong rein will be pulled.
Berry, a fine rider building an impressive list of Group 1 winners, could do little wrong at the same track two weeks earlier, with three winners and three narrow seconds. This day, through rides in the first five races, he’d gone without. Entering the home straight in the Vinery Stud Stakes, he’d make a decision on Winx. It can happen to the best of them.
Jumping fairly from gate six, Winx, as was growing customary, drifted rearwards to settle second-last, one off the fence with cover. As the fourteen gallopers strung out in the back straight, in front of her was stablemate Ballet Suite, who trailed behind another roughie in Thunder Lady, who in turn trailed the sweet-travelling First Seal. As the pace quickened and the field began to bunch towards the home turn 450 metres out, Winx, still some twelve lengths from the lead with two rivals behind her, responded to Berry’s urgings.
Berry pushed up, moving to improve outside Ballet Suite. Just ahead, Thunder Lady had pulled out to be the widest runner. This presented Berry with a chance to slip between the two and accept a juicy invitation — to trail First Seal up the straight, hopefully later to pounce. But for those first sixty metres of the straight, Ballet Suite and Thunder Lady also accelerated, and Winx couldn’t quite take the gap. Enticing though First Seal’s rump may have been, luck — good or bad — could still play a part when driving through horses. The safer, surer option would have been easing slightly and hooking to Thunder Lady’s outside, eliminating the chance of interference.
Berry pushed onward and within a few strides regretted it. Ballet Suite wobbled outwards, Thunder Lady shied in away from her rider’s whip, and horribly quickly the gap that gaped nanoseconds earlier was slammed shut. Winx made perilous contact with Ballet Suite’s hindquarters. Berry was forced into evasive action, easing back and now switching left around Thunder Lady. But by then, momentum lost and eight lengths back at the 250, the bird had flown.
At the front First Seal was making her move, but inside and ahead was one moving faster. Fenway, a Victorian with only a Bendigo maiden to her name, but who had travelled well in the one-one, bolted clear and held on to upset the favourite by a short neck. Winx’s tormentors, Thunder Lady and Ballet Suite, continued their runs into third and fourth.
Master trainer Tommy Smith always insisted his horses be positioned in the first three or four, the rationale being you’ll suffer far less interference that way. So too a pair of giants who learned under him — his daughter Gai Waterhouse and Peter Moody. Some horses, by their nature, prefer a rearward passage and a flying finish — like Bernborough, Super Impose, Chautauqua and, it was emerging, Winx. What’s needed is either clear air out wide or a large dose of luck from the racing gods. On occasion their rider might thread a way through the pack, but the percentages are low, the perils including being stuck behind tiring horses, or losing momentum by changing course.
Winx, still five lengths off the lead on regaining top gear at the 100, rattled home to grab fifth on the line, just two lengths behind Fenway. Knowing in hindsight her finishing strength — which Berry had also felt the start before — there’s a strong case to say Winx would have won without the interference.
Prominent form analyst Gary Crispe later rated her effort as ‘clearly the run of the race’, noting she’d come from a dozen lengths behind on the turn ‘on a day when it was difficult to make up ground’. There was little said of Berry’s ride publicly, other than Peter Tighe telling a newspaper Winx was given no hope by being allowed to drift too far back.2
Victory was sweet for an emotional Blake Shinn. He’d been sacked from First Seal after her Coolmore defeat, only to then pick up the ride on Fenway and provide the horse’s trainer — his stepfather and mentor, Lee Hope — with a first Group 1 after decades of trying. Racing’s roundabout had come around, the turf gods smiling on Shinn.
As Shinn began celebrating, Berry hopped off Winx for the last time.
***
Back to licking their wounds, the Winx camp was confounded. Trainer and owners could not get away from the belief they had a good horse on their hands, but at this stage were left to hope she was better than her results.
One win in six, and against doubted opposition. There’d been bad luck but again, losing can become a habit. What’s more, the qualities it takes to succeed — confidence, and the will to win — can be shaken when a horse learns frightening things can happen in races, like the violence dealt Winx by Ballet Suite and Thunder Lady.
Winx needed an affirming win to show her connections they weren’t wrong; a Group 1 that would see potential fulfilled. They hoped it would come in the Australian Oaks in April. Surely.
Success in this prestige-laden event would ensure the splutters of this, her third campaign, would be forgotten. First run in 1885, the race has been a stage of exquisite quality. In fact, Winx had been contesting races honouring past Oaks winners, such as Flight (1944), Light Fingers (1965) and Surround (1977). Throw in Wenona Girl (1961), Leilani (1974) and Bounding Away (1987), and the list is a roll call of champion females.
Reassuringly, and slightly ironically, the field for the million-dollar classic looked weaker than that for the Vinery. First Seal, not considered a 2400-metre prospect, would be out of the way. Fenway had been rated a chance, but was injured and scratched on race eve, leaving a field of eleven. Tommy Berry was booked to ride Waller’s Wine Tales, but, exacerbating the jockey’s change in fortunes, that filly would also be withdrawn on race morning, reducing the field to ten.
Winx was an early, short favourite, and would be backed in on the day to start at $2.80. Among the opposition were Ballet Suite and Thunder Lady, whose impressive finishes in the Vinery now had them under the $10 mark. There was the threat of the unknown from the proverbial Kiwi raider Savaria, fresh from narrowly taking the New Zealand Oaks a month before. Bowman was back in town, but rather than Winx he’d stick with the Bjorn Baker–trained Candelara, a $7 chance after the pair’s comfortable success five days earlier in a key Oaks lead-up, the Adrian Knox Stakes.
For a new jockey for Winx — the fourth of her ten-start career — and perhaps that missing something to spark a change of fortune, Waller looked abroad for gifted intervention, calling on the rider known as the ‘Magic Man’.
Joao Moreira had come from a childhood of abject poverty in Brazil to become one of the leading jockeys in not just his eventual base of Hong Kong, but also the world. His feel for horses and his guile in the saddle would lead him to become a continent-hopping rider keenly sought for the world’s biggest races, listing career highlights including eight winners from ten rides one staggering day at Sha Tin. Waller had formed a bond with the thirty-year-old, the pair celebrating three Group 1s that season through He’s Your Man’s Epsom Handicap at Randwick, and Brazen Beau’s Flemington straight double in the Coolmore Stud Stakes and the Newmarket Handicap.
Waller hoped engaging Moreira would prove a telling move as Winx tackled the Oaks. He also hoped Moreira could secure him two other Group 1s that Saturday: on Catkins in the Queen of the Turf Stakes, and on Royal Descent, who’d won Waller the Oaks two years before, in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
Winx was stepping up an extra 400 metres, but her finish in the Vinery two weeks earlier suggested she’d cope. Thunder Lady was proven at the distance, running second in the 2500-metre VRC Oaks six months earlier, as was Savaria. Randwick started the day with a heavy 8 rating, upgraded by Oaks time to a soft 7. At least that shouldn’t have mattered to Winx, who’d won in the heavy.
While punters were in little doubt, Waller, outwardly at least, took a more even approach. He said there wasn’t much between Winx and his other filly Ballet Suite, and that the two were ‘very similar’. (A nod here to the glorious uncertainty of racing: Ballet Suite won one of six subsequent starts before being retired.)
Though Sydney’s rain had eased, the city turned on a grey and shadowless day for one of its biggest meetings of the year, featuring four Group 1s including the $4-million Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps the weather kept some fans away. One Melbourne scribe, more used to booming spring carnival meetings back home, commented on a somewhat flat atmosphere at Randwick, where 23,000 fans attended — a full 10,000 short of the track’s peak since its 2012 redevelopment.3
Still, the low clouds and crowds didn’t dull the enthusiasm of Winx’s entourage. Peter Tighe walked on course with optimism high and a spring in his step, saying he expected Winx would ‘come to the fore’ over the old mile and a half distance.4 Waller was also bullish about the filly’s chances, suggesting her last-start failure could be overlooked.
‘Winx didn’t have the best of luck in the straight,’ he said of the Vinery Stakes. ‘She has been at this level for a while and I think she will run a great race.’5
As the Oaks, race six of ten, approached, Moreira was hoping for a change of luck. He’d flown in from Hong Kong with a strong-looking book of rides, but had so far piloted five horses — all but one of them under $5 odds — for an eighth, a fourth, a twelfth, a fourth and a fifth. Similarly, the day had been quiet for Waller, by his standards, though he hoped three-year-old Delectation’s win in the race before the Oaks was a sign of better things. As the ten fillies paraded before their searching staying test, he legged Moreira aboard hoping dearly that Winx, too, would turn a corner. As the field went into the barriers in front of the fans halfway down the home straight, most punters were convinced their renewed faith in Winx would not prove misplaced.
This time, when the gates opened, a change of tactics for Winx was revealed. She jumped well from barrier one and, rather than settling near the tail, Moreira urged her up to sit fourth and fifth through the first half of the race, six lengths behind Bowman and Candelara in the lead, with Thunder Lady fourth and Savaria last. Through the middle stages, however, Moreira allowed Winx to relax more. Drifting off the fence for better going, she was passed on her inside by $17-shot Gust Of Wind, and when two others surged forward, Winx had been shuffled back to third-last of the ten with 1100 metres left. Her backers watched and hoped Moreira hadn’t set her too large a task.
Amid growing urgency as Bowman quickened the pace, Moreira bustled Winx to improve past the 800, hooking wide approaching the home turn. But as Candelara tired, the unsung Gust Of Wind, continuing her dream inside run, shot to the lead. With 400 metres left Winx was sixth, five lengths away. At the 300, building her run, she was three lengths behind. With Gust Of Wind under heavy riding from young jockey Tye Angland — sacked from Thunder Lady after the Vinery — punters prepared to cheer another Winx winning burst.
To their dismay, try as Moreira did, at the end of this testing 2400-metre journey Winx’s swoop just would not come. Though a clear second, she could make no headway on the gallant, if unloved, leader. Gust Of Wind and the jubilant Angland finished two and a half lengths ahead and, amid a muted atmosphere from disgruntled punters in the grandstands, the Winx enigma grew.
***
Crestfallen. Baffled. Gutted.
Debbie Kepitis, Richard Treweeke, Peter and Patty Tighe and Chris Waller didn’t end Oaks Day breathless, but with the air taken out of them by Gust Of Wind.
There were no excuses. Winx was comfortably beaten by a horse with a 68 benchmark rating — the figure assessors use to decide a horse’s level of ability — compared to Winx’s 95; by a horse who, compared with Winx’s $443,000 in earnings, had won $31,150.
Moreira, who also struck out for Waller on Catkins (second) and Royal Descent (third), had let Winx drift rearwards, but in truth she had had ample opportunity. She was not good enough.
To most who’d backed her, she was now merely a beaten favourite, dreaded tag that it is. Again, she barely rated a mention in the next day’s papers. Was this promising filly merely good? Worse still, did she warrant an even lower descriptor? Was she only handy?
Next morning, back at the Rosehill stables, or ‘square one’ as it might have been called, Waller, Liam Prior and a few other staff members ran their eyes and hands over the humbled Oaks aspirant. Left again without excuses or reasons, such as a minor injury, Waller uttered a much-remembered quote.
‘Boys,’ he said, ‘she looks no good.’6
By now, Winx had earned $643,000, so the owners were well in front. But had she got away with two black-type wins? Some owners might call that reason enough to cash in and send a girl to the breeding barn, lest that record become more tarnished.
Waller scratched his chin and considered the possibilities. She’d had five runs that campaign, possibly enough. Was it time for the spelling paddock, and a little more growing? Should they wait and see what kind of four-year-old mare came back for the spring?
Not just yet. It was another trying decision, but the call was made to push on a little further. The master trainer was convinced this horse had a Group 1 in her. It was a matter of finding the right one.
At this stage, that possibly meant the weakest one. After Sydney’s autumn carnival, attention focuses on Brisbane for its peak time of year in winter. With Winx’s career having gone south, Waller looked north, for the Group 1 Queensland Oaks seven weeks ahead in late May.
There’d be challenges. Winx had been in work for some time and Waller would walk a tightrope of keeping her fit enough for the Oaks and not flattening her, tiring her too much, before it. He decided she could have only one lead-up race before that staying test.
Before the lead-up, she’d be kept going with a barrier trial, in which she came third of nine under another jockey, James McDonald.
Then would come that lead-up race over 1600 metres — a worrying 600 metres shorter than the Queensland Oaks — in the Sunshine Coast Guineas. It’s a Group 3 event, which, with respect, had never been high on anyone’s radar.
It is now famous.