THE ACCIDENTAL CHAMPION
INX is the accidental champion, the result of two wonderful strokes of bad luck. The odds against her being born at all were outrageously long because her mother was the result of a breeding “accident”. And the longevity of her stellar racing career was shaped by a paddock injury that seemed a serious setback at the time. The first part of the story behind the story of Winx belongs to a Kiwi horse breeder named John Corcoran, who originally comes from the remote Southland grazing country that produces world champion shearers, Huntaway dogs and regrettable sheep jokes. Call it the gambler’s tale.
Corcoran is a seasoned storyteller and likes to set up the punch line from a long run-up. First he tells how he turned $8 into $33,000 in the 1970s with one “pick six” bet that bought his stud property. Without that bet — six winners at total odds of better than 4000-1 — Winx would not have been bred.
The second part of the unlikely story is of the “wrong stallion” standing in to cover Winx’s grandmother Vegas Magic after the “right stallion” dropped dead at the key moment.
The odds against those three things happening are longer than hitting a hole-inone in the British Open with a broken broomstick, but that’s how it happened.
Corcoran tells how he went looking for a stallion in the late 1990s and found two. One was Batavian, who came straight off the track from the Graeme Rogerson stable on a share deal. The other was the Aussie battler Al Akbar, who was going out of fashion and going cheaply.
Rogerson, the P.T. Barnum of racehorse training and breeding, owned more horses than he could count. Among them was an undistinguished mare by an American-bred stallion named Voodoo Rhythm. Voodoo Rhythm’s name sounds like a Rolling Stones song, but as a stallion he was more a suburban pub rocker. But he did leave some good-looking stock, and those looks were passed on to the mare, Vegas Magic, and her offspring.
Vegas Magic was a mediocre racehorse — she won two weak races — but was destined to distinguish herself more as a producer than a galloper. The failed race mare would become an unusually fertile mother. In 13 seasons of breeding, she produced ten youngsters that were sound and promising enough to be registered to race.
Eighth of the ten was the handsome filly that would be called Vegas Showgirl, foaled when Vegas Magic was 17.
The rule-of-thumb is that old mares and old stallions tend to lose the power to transmit quality as they age. Statistics show that horses older than 15 produce fewer winners. But Vegas Magic was the exception to the rule and would prove the best of the lot … but she wasn’t the foal that Kiwi trainer Graeme Rogerson and his office manager Denise Howell had set out to breed.
It was their stallion Batavian’s second season at Corcoran’s stud in 2001, and they sent Vegas Magic and another undistinguished mare there to get in foal to him. They had a share deal with Corcoran to split any profits from Batavian.
Batavian was lucky just to be there, intact and in some demand, as relatively few racehorse colts get to be stud stallions. But his luck was not all good. Locked in his genes, along with the ability to gallop a little harder than most, Batavian carried a time bomb. He was descended on one side from a line of thoroughbreds prone to heart attacks.
If there is such a thing as a horse dying happy, Batavian did. The heart attack hit, as John Corcoran recalls it, while the stallion was serving his first mare of the new season.
Corcoran called Rogerson with the bad news—and a cunning plan to salvage at least one full service fee from the disaster. He didn’t want to lose both Rogerson’s mares so he told him Vegas Magic was in season, ready to breed, so should immediately be served by Corcoran’s own stallion (for a modest fee, of course) rather than miss the chance for several weeks while her owners looked around for another sire.
Corcoran’s other stallion was Al Akbar, a “bread and butter” horse even more humble than Batavian. A case of if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.
Vegas Magic conceived and produced the beautiful racehorse that would become Winx’s mother, Vegas Showgirl. She would race nine times as a two-year-old, and win on both sides of the Tasman.
Her last win was on the Sunshine Coast in the winter of 2007. The same track where, eight years later, her second foal would also win — beginning the greatest winning streak in elite horse racing in more than a century.
But that wouldn’t have happened without the other bit of bad luck... T was a case of absence makes the heart grow stronger. But it didn’t seem so promising when it happened.
Exactly seven months after being bought and sold at the 2013 Magic Millions yearling sales, being broken to saddle and educated to gallop, Vegas Showgirl’s unnamed daughter stepped arrived at Chris Waller’s main stables at Rosehill.
Her arrival was no big deal. The leggy, “unfinished” filly looked a long way from making her racing debut, let alone be mentioned in the same breath as the world’s premier two-year-old race, the Golden Slipper. That first week, Waller mentioned to the owners she might have “a start as a 2YO” mainly for educational purposes. But within another week, he had changed his mind, sending a long message to the owners proposing to spell her briefly then prepare her for a start “pre-Christmas”.
In just two weeks Sydney’s best trainer had gone from “won’t get too serious with her” to planning a race before Christmas—the traditional route to the early races used to gauge Gold Slipper candidates.
But fate, never far away in racing, took a twist. Instead of returning from the spelling paddock in five weeks to prepare for her debut, the newly-named filly developed a hoof abscess. At first, Waller hoped it wouldn’t delay her preparation but as weeks passed his messages to the owners grew increasingly downbeat. She was back in work in late November but by the second week of December, Waller told the owners the bad news: their filly needed to go to the paddock for complete rest while her hoof recovered.
Looking back, it’s hard to know if the hoof problem cost Winx an early win – or was a blessing in disguise. The answer is probably ‘Both’ but the enforced absence from the hurly burly of the track meant months of gentle exercise and time to grow.
Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, Waller realises that if the young Winx hadn’t gone lame that Christmas, she would probably have run in the 2014 Gold Slipper in the autumn.
“Her class would have got her into the Slipper,” he told the author earlier this year. “But her form until she turned four suggests she wouldn’t have won it. She probably would have been just another runner—and it would have been a different story for her after that … she’s a better horse now than she would have been.” HERE’S a great parallel between Winx’s breeder John Camilleri and Black Caviar’s breeder Rick “Harry the Hirer” Jamieson and his bloodstock agent Peter Ford. Like Jamieson, Camilleri is a fiercely competitive, independent businessmen who studies pedigrees keenly. Like Jamieson, Camilleri has an astute horseman as an adviser.
Jamieson hit the jackpot