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PETER MOODY CAN’T remember the first time he saw the bay horse whose dodgy hooves would change the course of his racing career. Nor can Tony Haydon, his stable foreman at the time. ‘He got under our guard,’ Haydon says simply.

It must have been early 2013, some months after both men had returned from Black Caviar’s breathtaking, heart-wrenching victory in the Diamond Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot. Queen Elizabeth – a great horsewoman in her own right, and a renowned thoroughbred breeder – had watched as Moody’s valiant mare, far from sound and ridden as kindly as a jockey could ride a horse in any race, took victory a breath in front of three-year-old filly Moonlight Cloud.

Was the narrow win, unusual for a horse who regularly dominated fields, a sign that the world was turning against the stable? It hardly seemed the case, as the trainer and his small Australian entourage gathered around their gallant warrior and met the Queen. If anything, the opposite seemed true, as international media pressed for their attention, and fans from around the globe sent their congratulations. Moody’s team was surfing a tsunami of adoration, much of it genuine, some of it concocted by racing’s spin-doctors.

So Lidari’s arrival at Moody Racing’s yard back in Melbourne some months later was business as usual. The bay with the touch of white on his forehead and a dusting of pink on his nose was the latest purchase by OTI Racing, a successful syndicate the trainer knew well. He had trained several horses for them, and this one certainly met their careful criteria. The syndicate’s members were hunting far and wide for a horse who had the physical and genetic potential to win a Melbourne Cup.

They found Lidari in the south of France, where he’d made his racing debut in the care of Jean-Claude Rouget. His new trainer, however, recognised immediately that his hooves would not stand up to racing on the firmer, faster Australian tracks without special care. They had to be built up before they could withstand the new pressures to which they would be subjected.

This was something Moody was used to handling, a particular trait of European thoroughbreds. He knew it could be managed, having done it before with success. ‘I wouldn’t say [Lidari] specifically had terrible feet,’ the trainer recalls. ‘But we found with most of these Europeans, because they’re probably used to the softer ground, they come out here on the hard ground and they struggle, and end up with a lot of bruising, a lot of inflammation.’

This management involved a supplement in powder form that could be mixed into his daily feed. ‘I would say 90 per cent of the European horses we’ve trained, we’ve put them on the same regime,’ Moody says.

Not so typical was Lidari’s lack of manners. ‘He was just a cheeky European, spoilt colt, which they all tend to be when they get here,’ Moody explains, without rancour. ‘He always had an attitude, but you sort of knock it out of them when they get into our regime. But he always had a bit of a hot streak in him. We run into these horses from time to time, and [with] most of them, you get them worked and handled so much, they come out of it. But he was always a bit of a pig of a horse. And you know, the vets struggled to inject him. They couldn’t scope him, they couldn’t tube him. He was just a dickhead of a horse.’

With this attitude the young stallion should probably have been gelded, Moody says, but his good performances suggested he might have a future as a sire. If he could fulfil his potential on the track, he could earn good money for his owners at one of the lush stud farms in New South Wales or Victoria, and pump muchneeded staying blood back into Australia’s thoroughbred population. So he continued to be ‘a prick of a horse, and dangerous in the wrong hands’, Moody says.

These traits were unknown to the members of OTI Racing when they were the successful bidders for Lidari at the sale held on the eve of the 2012 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. What Terry Henderson, the group’s co-racing manager, still remembers about buying the horse is a sense of satisfaction, as the purchase represented the conclusion of a dogged pursuit: OTI had tried to buy him from Rouget’s stable months earlier.

The sale held on the eve of Europe’s greatest race had been a happy hunting ground for Henderson and his partners in the past. This time, they secured Lidari ‘for a relatively modest price’, Henderson says. ‘It might have been 150,000 Euro or thereabouts.’ Not bad for a competitor who had won five of his 11 starts so far.

The horse was dispatched to Peter Moody’s stable at Caulfield. He was already one of OTI’s main trainers: he’d had success with another of their French-bred ‘internationals’, the popular grey gelding Manighar. The two horses even shared a link in their family trees, with Linamix – Manighar’s sire – showing up as Lidari’s maternal grandfather.

Terry Henderson had known Moody for more than a decade. He’d been recommended to the trainer by one of Moody’s own competitors. ‘I said to Mick Price one day, who I’ve got a tremendous amount of respect for, as a guy and as a trainer, “Do you want this horse, Mick?” And he said, “You should probably be giving some to this guy. He’s bloody good.” And that’s how my relationship started with Moody.’

Henderson came to trust Moody deeply. ‘He has a King Kong–type appearance when he first confronts you,’ the owner says. ‘But you know, his relationship with his family – [and] I’ve seen the way he’s treated the young guys that work for him, his young riders and his staff – he really is a caring person.’

Having been importing Cup hopefuls for years, Henderson and his colleagues knew the risks involved. ‘One of the things you find from these horses is that we have a vision for [each] horse,’ he muses. ‘What the vision ends up being is usually totally different.’

They thought Manighar would be a Melbourne Cup horse, but he struggled at 3200 metres, the Holy Grail of Australian racing. ‘He was a really good 2000-metres horse that could run a mile and a half [2400 metres]. So they change so much under our regime over here.’

They believed their new acquisition could triumph over those extra 800 metres. ‘He’d won over a mile and a half in France when we bought him, at a listed level, which is a pretty good level. So there was every reason to believe that he could make Cup class.’

This was where Peter Moody came into play. ‘Pete was equal to our number one trainers, you know,’ Henderson says. ‘And he was the top trainer. He’d had Manighar. He’d shown that he could train French horses. It was the logical place for [Lidari] to go.’

The training track where Moody was based, however, was not. ‘I’m not convinced that Caulfield’s the best place to train stayers,’ Henderson argues. ‘History says it’s not. They’ve had, I think, one Caulfield Cup winner, one Cox Plate winner and one Melbourne Cup winner in the last 50 years. It’s not [good]. It’s an indictment. But as a training facility, it’s clearly excellent for horses up to a short distance, a mile or 2000 metres.’

Nevertheless, Moody coaxed Lidari towards the 2014 Melbourne Cup, plotting his path through the lead-up races that spring with care, and keeping the owners in the loop along the way. One of those races was the Group 1 Turnbull Stakes, a well-worn stepping stone to the major events.

History shows that if a horse performs well in this early spring feature, they might have the ability to progress to the harder, more lucrative contests. And if they were really good, they could become part of Australian racing’s great yarns, one of the heroes of Flemington, and Caulfield and Moonee Valley.

So the limelight certainly loomed for Lidari. No one could have predicted, though, that it would have a blue hue.