Best Australian Racing Stories (8 page)

Telford was a battler, a Sydney trainer who was born in Ballarat but grew up in New Zealand. He was obsessed by bloodlines and spotted the chestnut colt—lot 41 in the catalogue for the 1928 Trentham Sales—and implored his brother in New Zealand to buy the colt ‘if he was sound'. His ‘limit' was a paltry 200 guineas.

Telford's main problem was that he didn't even have the 200 guineas to back his judgement and had to convince one of the owners he worked for to pay for the horse.

The owner Telford decided to ‘convince' was David Davis, who ran a successful import business in Sydney. Davis was born in Russia into a Jewish family who emigrated to the USA and was a US citizen, which partly explains the decision to race Phar Lap in the USA five years later.

Davis agreed to fund the purchase and Telford's brother Hugh was in the sale ring at Trentham when the last lot of the day, lot 41, was led in. Hugh was not quite alone; one other bidder was present, but he was acting as agent for a buyer who had gone home and was unsure about his limit, so the colt was knocked down to Hugh Telford for 160 guineas on a day when 2300 guineas had been paid for a previous lot and prices on average were between 1000 and 2000 guineas.

Not only were Phar Lap's immediate family poorly performed, the colt himself was gangly and ungainly, well over 16 hands as a yearling (big even by today's standards) and a slow developer.

On the journey across to Sydney on board the
Wanganella
, Phar Lap became seasick and did not eat; he also broke out in pimples, which covered his face. He arrived looking more like a cartoon horse than a racehorse.

David Davis was so unimpressed on seeing the horse he had been cajoled into buying that he refused to pay for his training. Once again Harry Telford backed his own judgement and arranged to lease the horse for three years, cover all costs and pay Davis one-third of all prize money. An Asian friend of Telford's evidently suggested the Thai word ‘farlap' meaning lightning flash, perhaps a reference to the colt's glossy deep chestnut coat when he had recovered his health. The superstitious Telford, with November glory in his mind even then, wanted a seven-letter, two-word name as these had a good Melbourne Cup-winning record. So, the horse became Phar Lap.

Phar Lap was disinterested and lazy on the track and kept growing until he stood at 17 hands, so Telford had him gelded. Even so he ran poorly at eight of his first nine starts as a late two-year-old and early three-year-old. He did show a glimpse of what was to come by winning a Juvenile Maiden at Rosehill at his fifth start, after finishing last at his previous.

He then finished second in the Chelmsford Stakes and went on the first of his great winning jaunts, taking the Rosehill Guineas, AJC Derby, Craven Plate and VRC Derby before being sent out at even money favourite for the Melbourne Cup.

Phar Lap had run the same time for both Derbies and broke Manfred's record by a quarter of a second. In the Cup, with only 7 st 6 lb (47 kg), he had to be ridden by lightweight jockey Bobby Lewis.

It is often mistakenly stated that Lewis took the mount from Phar Lap's ‘regular jockey' Jim Pike, who could not make the weight. The truth is that the colt had been ridden in his first 14 races by eight different jockeys, although Pike had ridden him in both Derbies and would become his regular jockey, riding him at every one of his 16 starts as a four-year-old—for 14 wins. Pike rode the great chestnut 30 times in total, for 27 wins and two seconds.

The ‘Red Terror' could really be a terror to ride and he refused to settle for Lewis in the 1929 Cup. The jockey said later he just could not get the horse's head down or stop him reefing and pulling and so reluctantly he let him lead, only to be run down and finish third behind Nightmarch and Pacquito.

Nightmarch, the first good horse to be sired by Phar Lap's sire, was from the ‘outcast' stallion's first crop and was a year older than Phar Lap.

The Phar Lap bubble had burst: the ‘wonder horse' seemed to be just another ‘good 'un', especially when he was beaten into third again, behind Amounis, on his return to racing in the St George Stakes in the autumn.

The spring of his three-year-old season would prove to be a mere aperitif to Phar Lap's career on the racetrack. In the 18-month period starting from March 1930, and ending with his eighth placing, carrying 10 st 10 lb (68 kg), in the Melbourne Cup of 1931, the ‘wonder horse' started 32 times for 30 wins and two seconds, winning every major race in Sydney and Melbourne from a mile to 2 miles.

Those wins included the WS Cox Plate twice, two more Craven Plates to add to the one he won at three, the Melbourne Cup with ridiculous ease, carrying 9 st 12 lb (62.5 kg), and all the other classic races of the Spring and Autumn Carnivals in both cities.

The great horse won weight-for-age races by 20 lengths and broke the existing records for all distances between 1½ miles and 2 miles.

He started at prices like 14 to 1 on, and it is common knowledge that he remains the shortest-priced horse to win the Melbourne Cup, and the only ever odds-on winner. What some racegoers may not know is that he actually shut down the betting ring on no less than 12 occasions, when no bookmakers would take bets on the races he won. He also travelled to Adelaide and won two classic races there.

Jim Pike always said his greatest victory was when he took on the sprinters and beat them in the Futurity Stakes at Caulfield. On a bog track carrying 10 st 2 lb (64.5 kg), the big-hearted champion missed the start and then took off around the entire field to run down the good sprinter Mystic Peak.

Drama and sensation were part of Phar Lap's career. He was shot at before winning the 1930 Melbourne Stakes and then hidden away at St Albans near Geelong before winning the Cup three days later. He almost emulated the greats of former eras, like his ancestor Carbine, by winning four major races over eight days, three major races in a week and four major races in a month several times.

Phar Lap could probably have also won the Caulfield Cup of 1930, and the fact that he was left in the field and scratched quite late was controversial at the time. It was, indeed, part of a cunning plan.

Nothing outside the rules of racing took place, but some consider the actions of Telford and fellow Sydney trainer Frank

McGrath rather sneaky, while other racing men say it was a stroke of genius.

The plot revolved around three great horses: Phar Lap, Amounis and Nightmarch.

Nightmarch had defeated Phar Lap in the Melbourne Cup of 1929, but, the following spring, Nightmarch was defeated four times in a row by Phar Lap. Nightmarch's owner, Mr A. Louisson, had been heard to say that he would take the horse back to New Zealand for the New Zealand Cup if Phar Lap contested the Caulfield Cup.

In a conversation with Telford, Frank McGrath suggested that his great stayer Amounis, the only horse to defeat Phar Lap twice, would win the Caulfield Cup if Nightmarch and Phar Lap didn't start. He suggested that Telford leave Phar Lap in the Caulfield Cup field until Louisson took his horse home. In that time they could get very lucrative odds about their two horses winning the Caulfield–Melbourne Cups double.

The plan worked perfectly. Seeing that Phar Lap was set to contest the Caulfield Cup, Louisson took Nightmarch home and he duly won the New Zealand Cup. Then Telford scratched Phar Lap, stating that he didn't want to over-race the horse, and Amounis won the Caulfield Cup. Phar Lap, of course, famously and easily won the second leg and the two trainers sent a battalion of bookies near bankrupt.

Both Davis and Telford have been accused of over-racing their champion and Davis has been criticised for starting Phar Lap, against Telford's wishes, in the Melbourne Cup of 1931, with the cruel weight of 10 st 10 lb (68 kg), and for taking the horse to America.

Davis, however, seems in retrospect to have been a fair-minded man. He was grateful to Telford for finding the horse and allowed him to remain as part owner for a modest £4000 when the lease expired. It was also Davis who had Phar Lap's skin, heart and skeleton returned to Australasia after his tragic death.

It is also worth remembering that Telford had already won a Melbourne Cup with Phar Lap, while Davis had not.

Myths develop quickly in racing as in other fields of dreams and the truth is often forgotten when fiction and films are created from fact. Telford has been criticised for leaving young Tommy Woodcock in charge of the valuable champion in the USA, but the fact is that Telford's daughter had just died and he was organising her funeral. It is also true that a team of four, which included jockey Bill Elliott and vet Bill Nielsen, travelled to the USA with Woodcock and Phar Lap. David Davis was also in the USA managing the campaign. So the horse's assault on the US was meticulously planned.

It is a mark of Phar Lap's ability that the VRC changed the weight-for-age rules in 1931 to include allowances and penalties, in an attempt to bring the extraordinary horse ‘back to the field'. They also gave him a massive 22 lb (10 kg) over weight for age in the 1931 Cup.

Further testament to Phar Lap's greatness are the sensation he caused in the USA and the ease of his win in the invitational Agua Caliente Handicap, in Tijuana Mexico, at his first start on dirt after a long sea journey and an 800-mile road trip. He was also recovering from a bad stone bruise to a heel and raced in bar plates for the first time—and broke the track record. That win, his only start outside the relatively minor racing arena of Australia, made him the third-greatest stakes-winning racehorse of all time, in the world.

Phar Lap's tragic death and the theories surrounding it have been well documented, as well as becoming entrenched in racing folklore. The nation mourned and the autopsy showed a severe gastric inflammation from duodenitis-proximal jejunitis, a condition exacerbated by stress.

Later studies, as recently as 2008, showed the presence of arsenic in large quantities, which has led to all sorts of theories, ranging from Percy Sykes's statement that all horses at that time had arsenic in their systems, to theories of deliberate poisoning. Phar Lap had evidently been fed foliage cut down after being sprayed with arsenic-based insecticide.

Two things seem certain: the well-documented symptoms the horse suffered are totally consistent with duodenitis-proximal jejunitis, and there was a lot of arsenic in his system. The rest is conjecture.

Phar Lap was such a towering figure that the history of thoroughbred racing in Australia is divided into ‘before' and ‘after' Phar Lap. All champions since him have only ever been ‘the best since Phar Lap'. So it's entirely appropriate that this summary of our early champions and crowd favourites ends with him.

Comparing horses of different eras is silly, but people keep doing it. The exercise was described as ‘folly' by the US
Blood-Horse
Magazine
, which nevertheless, in 1999, ranked the top 100 horses ever to race in America. The panel placed Phar Lap, on the strength of one start in Mexico, 22nd.

When the findings were published, one of the panel recalled a conversation with Francis Dunne, who had been a placings judge at Agua Caliente and later a senior racing administrator in New York State. Dunne was asked, after Secretariat's Triple Crown win in 1973, whether Man O' War or Secretariat was the greatest horse of them all. He replied, ‘Neither: I saw Phar Lap.'

Why we came to love Schillaci

LES CARLYON

I
AM WAITING FOR
the bus after the last race at Sha Tin when the urger glides up on a rumour and a prayer. In the sultry heat of late-afternoon Hong Kong, he thinks he is Peter Lorre. Dragging on a fag, he first looks around for hidden cameras, then leans forward and intones: ‘I think I've got a really good horse back home.'

Yep, it is the big one. And me thinking it would merely be some tittle-tattle about Macau acquiring a nuclear arsenal.

He looks again and takes another drag. Before I can suggest we use the shoe phone, he goes on.

‘They say he could be something special.'

Why do they always say these things?

Still, rituals must be followed. As with the other thousand times I have been told this fairytale, I effect deep interest and do a little Peter Lorre stuff myself. After all, the inference is that one loose word could see me being placed in quicklime by certain parties who do not wish me well.

This, remember, is racing. Idiots will tell you it's an ‘industry'. Well, it may be, but before that it's a romantic comedy with a subtext of intrigue. Damon Runyon and Lewis Carroll write the scripts.

Most of these ‘really good horses' are last seen at Manangatang wearing pacifiers and toupées, and attended by chiropractors and remedial farriers.

Anyway, this beast I hear about in Hong Kong has won but two races, a Kyneton maiden, worth $2925, and a mid-week at Sandown.

All this happened in 1991. The horse was Schillaci, the big grey who ended up a folk hero and now will never race again, which means we are all losers.

They
were Lee Freedman, Schillaci's trainer, and his brothers Richard, Anthony, and Michael.

The ‘urger' was Schillaci's co-owner, David Christensen, a company director and accountant, a committeeman at Flemington and Caulfield, and a very upright gent. Only as an owner does he take on his Peter Lorre persona, although this has paled now that he has given up smoking.

As it turned out, he had something better than a ‘really good horse', and this had nothing to do with Schillaci winning eight group ones and two million bucks. Plenty of horses have won more races and more money.

Jeune is a really good horse. So is Danewin. But these and others merely inspire admiration. Schillaci belongs to another order, the guild that takes in Vo Rogue, Kingston Town, Manikato and Old Super. No, I'm not lining these five up on ability; what links them is more mysterious than that.

All could inspire affection. They came to be loved rather than admired. Because of the way they did things, they made people feel good and the sport seem grander than it is.