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THOROUGHBREDS IN AUSTRALIA race in what is widely promoted as a drug-free zone. Performance-enhancing substances, however innocuous they might seem to trainers trying to keep horses sound and strong through demanding racing preparations, cannot be present in a horse’s system on race day. Gone are the days of the replenishing steroids, the ‘milkshakes’ and tonics of unknown origins. Chemical assistance is a thing of bygone aeons, when racing was wild and romantic, and under-policed.

At least, that’s what the racing authorities are striving for. If anyone has an advantage on race day, it should come from superior horsemanship, a stable’s ability to train without the aid of pharmaceutical boosters. And from genuine, sound horses. Great effort goes into policing these relatively new and robust rules. Before and after every race, in every state, racing stewards – the industry’s sheriffs – direct that certain runners’ urine samples be ‘swabbed’, to ensure that all are competing on a fair, drug-free racetrack.

Still, authorities fear that racing’s chemists are three steps ahead of their testing regimes, constantly developing smarter, more invisible versions of the old ‘elephant juices’ that bedevilled Australian racing in the 1970s and ’80s. The aim way back then was simple: find a ‘rocket fuel’ to make a horse go faster, no matter what effect that effort, or the substance itself, had on the animal. Now, the science is slicker, as it is for human athletes. Speed is not the only quality that can be induced and nurtured, of course – and there will always be some who want to get an edge, insiders believe, no matter the risks.

In keeping with Australian racing’s push for a drug-free culture, a routine urine swab was taken from Lidari on the afternoon he ran second in the Turnbull Stakes. For over three months afterwards, Peter Moody heard nothing more about the procedure. With the stallion back at OTI Racing co-owner Simon O’Donnell’s farm in Kilmore, in north-east Victoria, for a summer break, stable life at Moody Racing rolled on as usual. Had the trainer known what the stewards knew within several weeks of that sample being taken on 4 October 2014, many things might have been different.

The results indicated a serious irregularity: the horse had raced with an elevated level of cobalt in his system. In Australia, the allowable race-day threshold at the time was 200 micrograms per litre of urine. Double the international standard, this took into account the fact that cobalt is often contained in standard, legally sanctioned vitamin treatments and feed supplements used by most racing stables around the country.

Underpinning this new rule was concern that a high dose of cobalt has a toxic effect on a horse, even as it mimics the effects of EPO by assisting the production of more red blood cells, which then pumps more oxygen through the horse’s system. It is also argued that more cobalt allows equine athletes to compete at a higher level for longer. In other words, the naturally occurring trace element is not a new ‘go-fast’ drug; rather, it may enhance endurance and assist in allowing horses to perform at a ‘sustained peak for longer’, and so be a ‘natural’ way of blood doping when abused.

But while major international research studies are still underway, a paper published in the Veterinary Journal in 2015 bluntly stated that ‘currently there is no evidence to suggest that cobalt chloride can enhance human or equine performance’. Professor Ali Mobasheri, head of the University of Surrey’s veterinary department, wrote that, aside from the lack of evidence for enhanced athletic performance in horses, ‘one of the key concerns is the paucity of information about the long-term safety of cobalt chloride administration and toxicity, especially in vital organs’.

More simply, the main issue of cobalt abuse could be one of equine welfare rather than performance enhancement. ‘In the US there have been reports of unexplained deaths in horses that were found to have elevated blood levels of cobalt chloride,’ Mobasheri’s paper continued. ‘Although cobalt salts have medical applications for the treatment of anaemia, cobalt can be highly toxic. It exerts well-known and well-documented neurotoxic effects, in addition to its toxic actions on the thyroid, the heart and the haematopoietic system.

‘High doses of cobalt in patients exposed to abnormal levels from damaged hip prostheses induce optic and auditory neuropathy. Furthermore, there are reports that cobalt exposure may lead to fatal cardiomyopathy and ischaemic heart disease in cobalt-exposed workers and occurred in regular beer drinkers who had consumed beer from breweries with cobalt contamination.

‘It is also worth commenting that cobalt–drug interactions are unknown, which could be significant as racehorses commonly receive non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and, in some racing jurisdictions, can race on furosemide medication.’

In a media statement that accompanied the paper, Mobasheri emphasised that the research team had ‘grave concerns over a potentially lethal practice in the [racing] industry, and are most concerned that some trainers continue to use Google as their source of information. It is the duty of veterinary surgeons working in the industry to ensure that horse trainers are aware of the dangers of its “amateur” use.’

There seems little argument about the damaging impact cobalt can have, especially when given in high doses to humans and horses over extended periods. Work done by Mary Scollay, the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission’s equine medical director, expands on this, and highlights serious welfare concerns.

Initially, Dr Scollay said, she was keen to test the assumption that, since cobalt induced the stimulation of red blood cells in humans, it would do the same in horses. ‘Why wouldn’t it?’ she surmised before starting the study. ‘But we have not seen that.’ Instead, her work with a ‘herd’ of research horses showed that high doses of cobalt led to profuse sweating, restless circling, muscle trembling and caused some horses to drop to their knees, or to briefly collapse. She also noted abnormal clotting in the blood she collected from horses in her study.

‘What was in the test tubes almost looked like lava lamps, with these globs of stuff kind of floating around,’ Scollay reported. This suggested a worrying side effect in relation to how hard, and how long, a horse might bleed when galloping. ‘Once the bleeding starts, if the clotting mechanism is impaired or doesn’t function, that bleed is going to last longer and, as a result, be more severe,’ the equine specialist said. ‘You have to ask yourself if any performance-enhancement that might result from the cobalt … is going to be negated by the fact that the horse is bleeding into his lungs in a fairly uncontrolled manner.

‘I’ve seen some cobalt administration at the doses that our intelligence tells us were being used,’ Mary Scollay said, ‘and it was pretty darn hard to watch. It was dramatic.’

In 2013 harness racing authorities in Australia were hit by a spate of cases in which horses returned unusually high levels of cobalt, and their colleagues overseeing thoroughbred racing quickly took on board the research done to that point, and conclusions reached in the ‘red hots’. The cobalt guidelines, so generous by global standards, were adopted in Victoria in April 2014, and at a national level on 1 January 2015.

At the time, not everyone was convinced of cobalt’s effects – and nor are they now. Debate continues around the world about the testing that has and has not been done on the effects of the substance, to precisely ascertain its impact. All agree that the threshold set by Australian racing authorities was fair, almost too fair. No horse can get close to that reading, most scientists say, unless it has been injected with a dose of cobalt chlorine. And that would be an illegal injection for an Australian thoroughbred.

The concentration of cobalt detected in Lidari’s initial urine sample on 4 October was 380 micrograms per litre; the B-sample returned an even higher reading of 410 micrograms per litre. Suddenly, Peter Moody – the internationally renowned horseman who had more than 100 horses in work at Caulfield, with 200 more waiting to come into his stable, a man who trained for some of the most influential owners in the country – was gazing at a new horizon, bordered by negative headlines.

On 13 January 2015, 14 weeks after Lidari had run in the race at Flemington, the trainer was informed of his horse’s excessively high ‘positive’, and asked to explain how Lidari had so much cobalt in his system at the time. If he could not, he was staring at possible charges being laid that carried a raft of severe penalties. The worst-case scenario included disqualification as a licensed trainer for three years.

Moody was not on his own at the edge of this cliff. By mid-January 2015, four other trainers in Melbourne alone were embroiled in the cobalt controversy. Although they had not yet been charged, they had already been tarred cobalt blue, and dubbed the ‘Cobalt Five’.

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Peter Moody and his staff were given time to explain to the stewards how Lidari and cobalt had become so intertwined. To make clear his position at this stage, he issued a media statement:

‘I’m devastated to be informed by Racing Victoria stewards that one of my runners has tested positive to a banned substance during the 2014 Spring Carnival,’ it read. ‘I have no knowledge or understanding as to how this could occur and will work with Racing Victoria Integrity Service department to bring this matter to a conclusion as soon as possible.

‘I take great pride in my role in thoroughbred racing in Victoria and strive to manage my business and support my wonderful group of owners and staff with the highest levels of honesty and professionalism. I will continue to the goal [sic] over the next few months, and do everything possible to clear my name. I will make no further comment until its conclusion.’

The stewards were more restrained in their comments. ‘We have had the drug’s presence [in Lidari] confirmed by labs in Western Australia and Hong Kong,’ said Terry Bailey, Racing Victoria’s chief steward.

It was not the first time the two men had been at odds in racing’s robust public arena. Nor would it be the last. Another ‘Queensland boy made good’, Bailey is as big and as bold a presence as Moody. He is also as passionate about racing, although he comes at it from an entirely different perspective. Growing up in Rockhampton, not too far from the Moody family in Charleville, Bailey went to the races with his father, who worked as a weekend steward at ‘Rocky’ and surrounding tracks and the trots on Saturday nights.

Like his fellow Queenslander, Bailey left school early – at 15 – preferring a job in the office of the Rockhampton Jockey Club. It wasn’t long before John Schreck, Australia’s most respected racing steward, tapped him on the shoulder and convinced him to move to Sydney.

‘The Sheriff ’, as Schreck is still known internationally – having run the stewards’ room in Hong Kong as well as Sydney, and wrangled Australia’s notorious Fine Cotton and Jockey Tapes scandals – was a hard marker, but saw real promise in his Queensland ‘import’. After three years under Schreck’s watchful eye, Bailey took up a position as a steward in Orange, four hours west of Sydney in rural New South Wales; eight years later he became chief steward on the Gold Coast. He was 28, and clearly another young man on a mission. It surprised no one when he moved south with his wife in 2001 to become Harness Racing Victoria’s new boss.

Shockwaves soon followed when a raid by stewards and police uncovered 62 vials of an illegal drug known as ‘blue magic’ at a property outside Ballarat. The scandal ended with the suicides of two key ‘racing identities’ charged over the matter.

Terry Bailey was the obvious choice to take over from Racing Victoria’s chief steward Des Gleeson when he retired in August 2008. By now 40, Bailey was a tough nut not easily rattled, a young sheriff keen to shake up an old town. As one racing scribe quipped at the time, he’d risen through the ranks so quickly that ‘if he’d been a horse, they would have swabbed him’.

Bailey’s mettle was tested over the next couple of years, as he initially went toe-to-toe with leviathan Irish trainer Aidan O’Brien about how his horses had performed in the 2008 Melbourne Cup, and then clashed with jockeys to curb their ‘overuse’ of whips. His presence was felt. But an ongoing battle with one particular rider made mainstream headlines nationally in 2012.

Early that spring, Terry Bailey alleged that Danny Nikolic – a gifted jockey whose career was marred by run-ins with stewards, as well as his own temper – had threatened him while they were both working at Seymour Racecourse. The chief steward said that, as he was climbing the ladder to reach the stewards’ tower at the country track, Nikolic stopped him. ‘We’ve all got families, cunt – and we know where yours live, cunt,’ Bailey claims the jockey told him.

There were no witnesses, but a photograph of a cocky Nikolic leaning in to talk to Bailey as he turns on the ladder of the stewards’ tower at least confirms the two men exchanged words. The jockey was charged with threatening a steward and eventually disqualified for two years.

Now, three years later, the chief steward was again standing square-jawed and firm, this time pitting himself against one of the three best-known names in Australian racing. If Bart Cummings was forever the ‘Cups King’, and Gai Waterhouse the sport’s queen, Peter Moody was surely the prince-in-waiting – a man few claimed to know well, but whom racing fans felt comfortable calling ‘Moods’.

Bailey and Moody had come through a stoush less than a year earlier, after a stewards’ edict that all trainers at Flemington and Caulfield hand over the keys to their stables to allow racing authorities unimpeded access. The trainer had been strident in his criticism of the policy, resigning from the Australian Trainers Association in protest over the issue. ‘How much is too much?’ he asked at the time. ‘Will they want the keys to my house, my car? Where are we going to draw the line in the sand?’

In the end, he was the lone hold-out; by mid-April 2014 the impasse was broken, with the chief steward insisting that ‘any misunderstanding between the stewards and Peter Moody regarding the requirements of Rule 8B has now been resolved between both parties’.

While the air had been cleared, the incident seemed to leave both men unsettled. One thing was certain: it was in neither’s character to back down. A mighty new rumble, centred on cobalt, was the best tip in town.

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Two of the four other trainers embroiled in the cobalt investigation, albeit in significantly different circumstances, were also prominent Victorian racing personalities: Mark Kavanagh, who had won a Melbourne Cup with Shocking and trained a brilliant filly called Atlantic Jewel, and his neighbour at Flemington, Danny O’Brien. Father-and-son team Lee and Shannon Hope were also in the stewards’ sights. But Moody was by far the biggest name to be caught up in the matter, which quickly made international news.

Australian vets were also under fire, with the vexed issue of their registration (or lack of it) being discussed as a serious issue. ‘Veterinary experts claim cobalt doping needs to be at near toxic levels to be effective, making horses “run like beasts, but you only get two or three good races out of them and then they’re done”,’ wrote journalist Michael Hutak. ‘The issue has again put the animal’s welfare on the front pages and has raised the temperature on an age-old push to make equine vets who work with racehorses licensed and fully subject to the oversight of stewards, in just the same way as trainers, jockeys and stablehands have for, yes, hundreds of years.

‘The vets’ professional associations have resisted licencing since “time immemorial” and Racing NSW chief steward Ray Murrihy told me that he had proposed such oversight twice over the years to no avail. One leading racing vet told me that Racing NSW “have their eye on a couple of rogue vets, we all know who they are”, who are doing untold damage to the game,’ Hutak, who edited The Gadfly column in the Sun-Herald through the 1990s, continued.

His remarks quickly proved prescient, as Tom Brennan – a vet based at the Flemington Equine Clinic – was first linked to and then charged over the Kavanagh and O’Brien cases, as well as a similar matter in New South Wales involving Kavanagh’s son Sam.

That young trainer told Racing NSW stewards that he had seen one horse have an adverse reaction after being treated by a Flemington Equine Clinic–supplied drip. He described Midsummer Sun as ‘shaking, trembling, sweating up’ after treatment, while Catherine Brown, a vet working at the clinic, said another horse had ‘sweated up like crazy and had veins popping out of its skin’.

But Brennan had nothing to do with Peter Moody’s stable at Caulfield. So over the next few months, the trainer and his staff tried to unravel what had occurred with Lidari. Nothing jumped out at them, because their feeding and supplement routine was as it had been for years. Nothing new had been added or subtracted, and cobalt was not on anyone’s agenda. The only thing that might have happened, he told the stewards, was that a supplement the horse had been given leading up to the race contained the substance and might somehow have ‘spiked’ in his system.

Taking this on board, the stewards tried to replicate the scenario, testing Lidari’s feeding and supplement menu on a control group of six mares. The results did not match. So on the morning of 10 July 2015, Racing Victoria’s chief steward walked into Peter Moody’s office in what had once been quite a stately residence on Kambrook Road, Caulfield, to issue him with three charges relating to Lidari’s positive swab result.

Under the Australian Rules of Racing, it was alleged that Moody ‘administered, or caused to be administered, the prohibited substance cobalt for the purpose of affecting the performance of Lidari in the race’; that he ‘administered, or caused to be administered, the prohibited substance cobalt, which was detected in a sample taken from Lidari prior to or following its race’; and that he ‘brought Lidari to race with the prohibited substance cobalt in its system’.

It was not a long meeting. It did not need to be. But the trainer recalls it was tense. When Bailey and his small team left, Moody phoned the few people he trusted. The first call was to his wife, the next to Brett Cavanough. His old friend was shocked. ‘Well, I know how straight [Moody] is,’ he says.

Cavanough recalls their conversation vividly, and was asked to recount it to stewards several months later. ‘The stewards came to my office and said, “We need to have a yarn to you, a debrief about Peter Moody.” They said, “We checked his phone records and it looks like he rang you about three minutes after we left his office; can you tell us what the conversation was?”

‘I said, “Yeah, I can.” ‘I said, “He rang me and said, ‘I’m fucked – cobalt’s got me. Someone’s got at me. Here’s 20 years of hard work all down the drain. Here’s Hong Kong out the window.’”

‘You know, he was in a state of shock at the time. He was almost emotional. He knew the repercussions of it all, and he’s never been like that. He’s never had a grubby name. We all live in the limits of therapeutic drugs, but if you’d said to me, “Peter Moody’s using this,” I would say, “No, because he’s too frightened.”’

For Cavanough, the charges simply did not fit with the trainer he had known for most of his life. Moody might have looked to the world like a big, bluff character, but Cavanough knew the man behind the persona. ‘He’s always been a good boy, don’t get me wrong,’ he says. ‘That’s why he’s never done drugs. The only thing he would ever have done [wrong] is a wheelie in a car, and probably went and drove fast. That’s probably the only bad habit he’s ever got, away from smoking. Driving fast and smoking cigarettes.’

Presenting a horse at the races with a positive reading was bad enough; to have two charges of ‘administration’ levelled against him looked damning. Without doubt, they would have an immediate impact on his business, not to mention his professional focus. They could destroy his career.

Publicly, it was clear that Peter Moody understood the ‘optics’ of the scenario. If no one else could stand up for him at this point, he would do it himself. He had nothing to lose, and was especially riled by the insinuation that he was a cheat.

‘I was very disappointed to be charged with administration of a prohibited substance,’ he told the media. ‘That takes away all of your credibility and unfortunately, the greater media are putting out there that you’re a cheat. I pride myself on my reputation. I don’t need to cheat. There probably hasn’t been a more consistent stable in Australia over the last 10 years than mine. I’m financially viable. I’m not a punter. I’ve got a lot of horses and one throws up this irregularity … To have your name muddied, it’s very hurtful … I love this industry, it has been great to me and I think that I’ve been great to it, too.’

Moody tried to explain why Lidari had needed a supplement added to his daily feed. For the first time, the racing world learned of the stallion’s ‘shelly’ hooves. ‘He wasn’t receiving treatment for a hoof injury as such,’ he said. ‘We were trying to promote hoof growth and he was on a treatment, a powdered substance that was purchased through the local feed supplier. Unbeknown to me, it had a concentration of cobalt in it, and this particular substance had a high ratio of cobalt in it.’

The explanation sounded plausible, if unsophisticated. For his part, Terry Bailey made clear that the trainer’s theory had been tested by stewards and found not to explain the high cobalt reading. ‘He was using a powder that contained some cobalt for treatment for a horse’s hooves. That trial test has been done, and those results don’t explain these levels,’ he said.

Bailey went on to say that he believed there were only two possible explanations for illegal cobalt levels: a horse has either ‘received large doses prior to race day, or received race-day treatment’.

It was already clear that a thorough understanding of chemistry would be necessary if one wished to fully understand the matter when it reached the Racing Appeals and Disciplinary Board. But a date for that hearing was not yet set. Given the saga was unfolding just months out from the start of Melbourne’s internationally famous Spring Racing Carnival, Australia’s favourite trainer was clearly in strife.

Six months earlier, Peter Moody had believed he didn’t need a lawyer when the stewards had informed him of Lidari’s positive cobalt swab. Now it was apparent he needed one with a proper grasp of racing law and a thorough knowledge of the way a stable functioned. Most importantly, Moody needed someone familiar with the sweeping nuances of the turf. A barrister, in other words, who knew how to play the ponies.

On the advice of owner and sports commentator Simon O’Donnell, the trainer engaged Matthew Stirling.