Best Australian Racing Stories

by Jim Haynes

  Some of us had seen Schillaci at trackwork the day before. Hurting everywhere, he was. As he shuffled out of the stripping shed for two easy laps on the sand, one word exploded in your mind. Lame.

  Schillaci stumbled, lurched, slouched, and several times stood stock still, a ghostly statue, grand but worn. Lesser beasts, full of oats and bravado, pranced and danced; Schillaci just looked tired. When he came off the track, they lifted his forelegs into tubs of ice. As Rebecca Newman recalled: ‘You could almost hear him say: Here I go again.’ At the races next day, a famous trainer told Christensen: ‘I saw your horse this morning and he’s bloody near a cripple.’

  Some cripple. Near the finishing post in the Futurity, Schillaci laid his long ears back, much like a heeler about to nip a bullock, and beat Jeune and Mahogany.

  A few weeks ago, Schillaci was back at Flemington for another campaign. ‘He was going really well,’ Michael Freedman says. ‘He looked great.’

  In the dark, with Damien Oliver up and going only a little faster than even time, the grey hurdled a white bandage lying on the wood-fibre track near the 600-metre mark, landed awkwardly, and in less than a second, blew away a large part of his off tendon and all of his career.

  ‘At first, I didn’t notice much wrong with him,’ says Oliver. ‘But coming off the track, I knew he was lame. I felt sick.’

  Rebecca Newman was waiting for them. ‘Damien said, “I don’t think Schillaci’s very well.” I looked down at his leg and thought, “Oh . . . oh, dear.”’

  John Van Veenendaal, the veterinarian who treated Schillaci, says the grey wrecked about 40 per cent of the tendon. The irony was that Schillaci had never had tendon problems. His trouble for two years was degenerative arthritis in the coffin bones of both front hoofs. Spurs had formed on the bones near the top of the hoof line. The gelding was also plagued by corns. Schillaci had grown into a massive horse, weighing 560 kilos, maybe more, and in the end his hoofs were just too small for his body.

  Early morning at Brackley Park, the Freedman property at Avenel, north of Seymour. The sky is a cloudless blue dome and the new grass sags under the dew. You feel cold and old Schillaci is warm to touch. He crunches on lucerne hay and flicks his ears to the slightest sound, be it a tractor or swallows nesting in the stables. He nuzzles you, looking for a carrot, then lays his ears back in disdain when you come up empty handed.

  Schillaci will live the rest of his life here because the Freedmans asked to keep him. Christensen was touched. ‘I’m delighted that Lee and his family think so much of the horse they want to give him a happy home. Knowing that makes me even more proud of him.’

  Dave Hitchin, the farm manager, leaves a filly to remove Schillaci’s rug. The grey nuzzles Hitchin’s pullover, smells the filly on it, and squeals like the stallion he isn’t. Kylie Baines takes him out to have his photo taken. At first, he is tender on his bad leg. Then he sees the colts in the day yards and starts to swagger. He wants to plunge and rear and let them know he’s better than they’ll ever be. As on race days, all pain is forgotten. Schillaci is some character.

  And, even, with that leg swaddled in bandages, some sight: tall, better than 16.2 hands, and long, incredibly long. He is power without coarseness, refinement without prettiness. A big eye: kind, intelligent and dark. A great sweep of shoulder and a length of rein to match. Bulging forearms and, behind, swelling bunches of muscles from hip to hock, the rear end of a quarter horse on the legs of a thoroughbred.

  That powerful body is half the reason Alan Bell, a Rosehill veterinarian and trainer, bought him for $70,000 as a yearling; the other half is Schillaci’s blood. He descends from mares bred by the legendary Stanley Wootton, who imported Star Kingdom and, with that one stallion, changed the pattern of Australian breeding. Bell figured he was buying generations of Wootton’s genius. He offered Christensen a piece of the horse a few months later. Christensen recalls Bell said something like: ‘I think this horse could be exceptional.’

  Schillaci didn’t race at two. He was gelded and given time to grow up. Early on, he was with Richard Freedman at Epsom. Richard, as is his way, tended to undersell the horse. But brother Anthony says, ‘He’d declared him a champion before he’d even raced.’ Schillaci had been sitting eight-wide in trials—and winning. Which may explain why he was odds-on for that first start at Kyneton.

  At his fourth start, he won the Lightning Stakes. At his next two, he won the other legs of sprinting’s triple crown: the Oakleigh Plate at Caulfield, in track record time, and the Newmarket at Flemington. Then, in perhaps the best win of his career, he took the Galaxy at Randwick, his fourth group one for the season. He was young; he could fly, and he didn’t hurt anywhere.

  After the grey’s first win in the Lightning, Lee Freedman told the mounting-yard throng: ‘This horse is another Manikato.’ At trackwork last week, Freedman recalled the reaction. ‘They all said to me, “Well, you’ve just gone straight off your head. You’ve gone stone mad.”’

  Some madness. After his three-year-old season, and despite aching hoofs, Schillaci won another four group ones, including two Futuritys. When he won a sprint on Caulfield Cup Day last year, he received a longer and rowdier ovation than Paris Lane, the Cup winner.

  Lee Freedman isn’t given to mushy sentimentality. Asked how he saw Schillaci, he thought long before replying.

  ‘You get lovely racehorses,’ he said softly. ‘You know, they win good races for you, but this one . . . ?’ He sighs and his voice rises. ‘Ah, he was something more: he was a lovely animal. There was no enigma with him: what you saw was what you got.’

  After the accident, Freedman was drinking with friends at a Toorak hotel. The friends began toasting Schillaci and Freedman began to feel teary. He left and went shopping.

  Rebecca Newman, tiny and vivacious, is sipping iced coffee and walking back to the Freedman stables at Flemington after trackwork. It doesn’t seem right: Schillaci, the carrot addict, doesn’t live there anymore.

  ‘I’ve lost my best friend,’ she says. ‘There’ll never be another like him. Such a character: you’d just stand there feeding him carrots and he’d do anything.

  ‘He was so kind. On the track, you’d have to hunt him up all through his work. But when you turned him to come home, he’d turn on like an electric light and want to canter all the way home.

  ‘Oh, he’d do things wrong. Going out sometimes, he’d stand as still as a statue, refusing to move. Occasionally, he’d whip around and dump you. Then he’d stop and stare down, as if to say: What are you doing down there?

  ‘To strap him at the races . . . well, that was just indescribable. The crowd would follow you everywhere. People would ask me for one of his shoes. When he was retired we got fan mail. A father wrote on behalf of his son. He wanted to thank us for the pleasure the horse gave his boy.’

  Long before the grey ruined his tendon, Rebecca had become proprietorial. Schillaci would annoy her when he did his ‘statue act’. What she resented much more, however, were well-meaning people getting behind the grey to hunt him forward. She could scold him, but not outsiders.

  ‘I’m going to miss him terribly,’ she says.

  Aren’t we all.

  6 October 1995

  Sunline: A freak of nature

  JIM HAYNES

  ‘THEY ALL LOVE SUNLINE.’

  It was the bloke standing beside me in the TAB. The place was abuzz with comments, the usual ill-informed, well-informed and half-informed opinions that you get in any TAB when it is more than likely that a protest will be lodged. Men talking to anyone who will listen, or to no one in particular, or to no one at all.

  But this was different.

  It was not only the Cox Plate; the horses involved were the best three horses racing at the time!

  It was 27 October 2001.

  I’d backed Viscount, the Inghams’ immaculately bred and trained three-year-old. I thought he was a classy conveyance and well suited at weight for age against the two champs, Sunline and Northe
rly. I still think the same. He should have won.

  Sunline had led into the straight with Viscount behind her, waiting to start his winning run, and Northerly had been working home down the outside.

  In his efforts to lift Northerly and reach the mighty mare, Damien Oliver had ridden the Western Australian champion out vigorously. Northerly had strained every sinew to the limit until the effort was too much. Then he ducked in under pressure, just as Sunline rolled out slightly for the same reason.

  Viscount was the meat in the sandwich; he was crunched in between the two older horses, lost all momentum and was lucky to stay on his feet. Sunline’s head went way up in the air as she, too, lost momentum, and Northerly, the main offender and the only horse of the trio to keep his momentum, pulled ahead to win by half a length.

  The booing started as the horses returned to the birdcage.

  That’s when I commented through my pocket to the bloke beside me, ‘No wonder they’re booing,’ I said, ‘Viscount was robbed!’

  He looked at me in that sad way older racing addicts have when confronted by ignorance. Then he said, ‘They’re not worried about the Inghams’ horse, mate, they’re booing ’cos Sunline didn’t win— they all love Sunline.’

  Maybe he was a Kiwi, but he was right anyway. They all did love Sunline.

  Certainly all New Zealand loved her; when she died there was a news special on national television.

  And why wouldn’t they love her? Not only was she undefeated in her home country, she travelled to Australia and beat our best, and then went to Hong Kong and beat the mighty Fairy King Prawn over a mile in a world-class international event. She was the best middle-distance horse of her era and certainly the best mare to ever race over middle distances in Australasian turf history. Her record proves it.

  When the protests came that day there were three of them: Sunline against Northerly, and Viscount against the other two, so second against first and third against first and second.

  In a travesty of justice, all were dismissed.

  I still maintain that Viscount should have won. And all fair-minded racing fans consider that Sunline’s record against Northerly should show one victory and two losses, instead of three losses.

  I still maintain it should have been Viscount first, Sunline second and Northerly third.

  In any case, we all agree the mighty mare should have been put ahead of Northerly—a champion in his own right—just once in her career!

  ‘But Northerly won by half a length,’ I hear the voice of reason saying, ‘and that was why the stewards gave him the race.’

  ‘Yes,’ I answer in my imagination, with more than a hint of frustration, ‘and he won by that far because the interference was so bad !’

  Punters have long and bitter memories of racing injustices.

  While I was preparing this collection, it was announced that Sunline had lost her long battle with laminitis and had been put down.

  That sad news made me think back to how I’d seen her in victory and defeat, in the flesh, not on the TAB television screens.

  I have two vivid memories of Sunline. I saw her race maybe half a dozen times, but two memories are unforgettably clear. Because they were the most memorable two-horse-wars I ever saw.

  Randwick is a track that really sorts out the champs from the pretenders down the straight. Sunline started there 12 times, usually carrying big weights, for six wins and four placings.

  I saw her win her second Doncaster in 2002, defeating Shogun Lodge after they raced side by side for two entire furlongs. That was the best nose-to-nose tussle I ever saw at Randwick.

  The crowd was in a frenzy; it was too close to call at the end. I thought she’d been beaten, but the photo showed her courage had paid off by a nose. The pundits thought she had too much weight that day to possibly win over the toughest mile course in the world.

  I still can’t believe you could get odds of 5 to 1 about Sunline in the ring when they jumped. And I still can’t believe I didn’t take it!

  Strangely enough the mighty mare also featured in the best battle down the straight I ever saw in Melbourne, at Caulfield, in the Caulfield Stakes in 2002.

  I have written about that great race elsewhere in this collection.

  It was a match race between Sunline, when she was approaching the end of her career, and Lonhro, who was nearing the peak of his career. There were some pretty handy horses in the supporting cast of the drama that day, but they were really only there for the crowd scenes, just making up the numbers.

  Trevor McKee and his son, Stephen, owners of Sunline, and the Ingham brothers, who owned Lonhro, rate as true enthusiasts and lovers of racing. It is credit to the McKees that Sunline, who could have been quickly retired to stud, raced on as a mare to give us all so many wonderful memories. The McKee motto was always, ‘We’re here to race.’

  Mind you, Sunline was an awesome force on any racetrack at any age, even at seven. She was strong and robust and towered over most of her male counterparts. She never looked frail, weak or delicate of disposition, attributes which many consider to be feminine. In fact, Greg Childs, who rode her for 32 of her 48 starts, described her as ‘a freak of nature’ and attributed her amazing ability to what he called her ‘masculine qualities’.

  She was feminine enough, however, to leave behind two sons and two daughters when she passed away prematurely at the age of just 13.

  As usual the crowd at Caulfield that day mostly supported Sunline. Not many Victorian racegoers were fans of the New South Wales horse in the cerise colours, although they would come to admire him—and his progeny—in seasons to follow.

  It was a mighty struggle between the young stallion and the seven-year-old mare, all the way down the straight, but neither horse shirked the task. Lonhro won by a head, with the rest of the field fighting out third place 6 lengths behind.

  But Sunline will be remembered for the races she won, not those she barely lost.

  Her two Cox Plate wins are enough to place her among the immortals. In the first she defeated Redoute’s Choice, Commands, Testa Rossa, Tie The Knot and Sky Heights—an impressive line-up of legendary horses! And she won the second by a record 7 lengths, defeating Derby and Caulfield Cup winner Diatribe along with Referral, Show A Heart and Shogun Lodge, as well as Testa Rossa, Tie The Knot and Sky Heights yet again.

  Add to those two Cox Plate wins her other Group 1 victories, two Doncaster Handicaps, two All-Aged Stakes, two Waikato Sprints, two Coolmore Classics (carrying 60 kg each time), a Flight Stakes, a Manikato Stakes, her controversial second to Northerly in a third Cox Plate, and her international victory in Hong Kong, and you have a record unbeaten in Australasian racing history.

  From her Group 3 victory in the Moonee Valley Oaks, as a three-year-old filly, until the end of her career at age seven, Sunline only ever competed in races at Group 1 or Group 2 level.

  Her win rate was 68 per cent and her place rate 94 per cent, and she raced at least two seasons beyond what most consider to be the correct age for racing mares to retire. She was the top stakes-winning horse in Australasian history in her day, and the top stakes-winning mare in the world. She is the only horse ever voted Australian Horse of the Year three times.

  How does her record compare to other great mares?

  Well, given that comparisons from different eras are rather silly to begin with, the only racing mares who even come close to Sunline are Wakeful, Desert Gold, Tranquil Star, Flight, Emancipation and Makybe Diva.

  Wakeful had a win rate of 58 per cent, well below Sunline’s a century later. Her place rate, at 41 from 44 starts, is amazingly close (at 93.3 per cent) to Sunline’s 45 from 48 (94 per cent). Each mare was unplaced only three times.

  Wakeful was more versatile than Sunline, winning from 5 furlongs to 3 miles and carrying 10 st (63.5 kg) to run second in the Melbourne Cup, less than a length behind Lord Cardigan, carrying 22 kilos less at 6 st 8 lb. Wakeful comes very close to giving Sunline a run for her money, but where she w
on ten races that would now be considered Group 1 level, Sunline won 13.

  Desert Gold was a New Zealander like Sunline. Her amazing run of 19 wins in a row easily eclipses Sunline’s best run of eight consecutive wins. Desert Gold, however, did most of her racing in New Zealand at a very different level to Sunline and, although she won a number of classic New Zealand races and had a great five-year-old season in Australia, winning quite a few weight-for-age events, her record at the very top level does not match Sunline’s.

  Desert Gold raced through the dark days of World War I for an overall record of 36 wins, 13 seconds and four thirds from 59 starts, very close to Sunline’s record. Her place rate is a very respectable 90 per cent, 4 per cent less than Sunline’s. Her win rate, at 61 per cent, again comes close to Sunline’s 69 per cent, but not close enough.

  Tranquil Star had an iron constitution. She started 111 times for 23 wins. That was her main claim to fame, her amazing stamina. She would have been a match for the great masculine mare, Sunline, as far as stamina went, and, like our heroine, she raced until she was past the age when most mares retired; in fact Tranquil Star raced a season more than Sunline, well into her eighth year. Unfortunately, she doesn’t really measure up in other ways.

  In her three-year-old season Tranquil Star became only the second female to win the St Leger. In her fourth year, however, Tranquil Star raced 21 times for only two wins and eight placings. Her Caulfield Cup win was commendable and, like Sunline, she won the Cox Plate twice in a row.

  Also, despite breaking her jaw in a bad fall at Moonee Valley, Tranquil Star went on, with a wired jaw, to win the Memsie Stakes, William Reid Stakes and the Mackinnon Stakes for the third time!

  Tranquil Star was, however, a beaten favourite on a record 18 occasions! The racegoers who had time to go on the punt during World War II must have been far more tolerant than they were in Sunline’s day!

  Within months of Tranquil Star’s retirement, a new heroine emerged to excite the wartime and post-war crowds. Flight, famously bought for 60 guineas by Brian Crowley, would go on to race 65 times for 24 wins, 19 seconds and nine thirds.