FAREWELL TO AN ICON
Thoroughbred phenomenon Black Caviar’s (Bel Esprit) final foal, a colt by Snitzel (Redoute’s Choice), will be reared as an orphan after the unbeaten mare was euthanised on Saturday owing to a severe hoof problem.
The great Peter Moody-trained sprinter and folk hero – who won a perfect 25 from 25 between April 2009 and April 2013 – successfully gave birth to the colt before being put down at Scone Equine Hospital on Saturday, one day short of her 18th birthday.
ANZ Bloodstock News understands the super sprinter had been troubled in recent weeks by laminitis stemming from an adverse reaction to treatment for a milk infection. She eventually foundered, leaving no reasonable prospect of any sustainable quality of life.
It’s understood the Snitzel colt – her ninth foal – will be reared at North stud in the Hunter Valley, where Black Caviar had been agisting, and where her prominent part-owner Neil Werrett keeps many of his horses.
Black Caviar bore four fillies and two colts in the six years from 2014, the last two a colt and a filly by I Am Invincible (Invincible Spirit), before she missed to that sire in 2019.
In 2021 she left Persian Caviar (Written Tycoon), now a yet-to-race three-year-old filly in the Moody and Katherine Coleman stable, but missed again twice that season, to Extreme Choice (Not A Single Doubt) and I Am Invincible again.
Black Caviar produced a colt by The Autumn Sun (Redoute’s Choice) last spring before her final cover, from his Arrowfield barnmate, Snitzel.
The super mare’s owners announced her death on Saturday in a statement, saying in part: “The ownership group are devastated, however will reflect on her glittering achievements not only in Australia where she transcended racing and captured the hearts of the public, but in England where she famously won the 2012 Group 1 Diamond Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot.”
Moody, carried by the mare from his humble upbringing in Wyandra, western Queensland, to meeting Queen Elizabeth II at Royal Ascot, said he had wept in his car after hearing the news of her passing.
“You don’t think it affects you,” he told Racing.com. “But you are being stupid not to think it doesn’t. It’s impossible not to get attached to most animals let alone one like her.”
Moody broke the news to Luke Nolen, who rode the hulking mare in 22 of her victories, and 14 of her 15 Group 1s.
“It’s a hollow feeling,” Nolen told Racing.com. “You could say she was just a horse, but she was more than a horse and that’s why we’re feeling a bit blue. She meant a great deal to us.
“She was an integral part of my career but, more importantly, she was so important for racing itself.
“It was great to be a part of her story, but I always felt a bit guilty because anyone could’ve done the job.”
Moody sometimes said the same thing of training the mare humbly known around his stable as Nelly, who took not just the Australian racing community but the nation as a whole on an unforgettable ride.
At the height of Black Caviar fever, as the dark brown mare’s winning streak shot into double figures with no sign of stopping, the clamour from the Australian public for the galloping machine was near unstoppable.
Several years before Winx (Street Cry) mania, Black Caviar was everywhere, front page and back. She was the first animal featured on the long-running ABC series Australian Story, and would later sit alongside the likes of Don Bradman, Rod Laver and Dawn Fraser in the Australian Sports Hall of Fame.
So too would her larrikin ex-Queensland trainer. Eleven years ago he and the mare’s owners had shed tears together after agreeing to her retirement, following her win in the 2013 edition of the TJ Smith Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m). Moody later reflected in his 2017 autobiography, A Long Way From Wyandra, that this was part sadness the journey was over, part relief it was completed undefeated.
Saturday morning brought more reflection with those who had shared the trainer’s place in her story, one defined by silky greatness but also by courage, and her amazing pain threshold in the face of a stream of niggling injuries caused by her eye-catching bulk, which mostly sat around 600 kilograms.
“The hardest part of this morning was contacting all the people involved,” Moody told Racing.com. “Myself and Jeff O’Connor, my racing manager, we’ve known for a few days that things were coming towards an end.
“To speak to the likes of Michael Bryant her chiropractor, Peter Angus her vet, Matty Martin her farrier, Tony Haydon my assistant trainer at the time, Donna Fisher her groom, Paddy Bell her work rider … I didn’t want them to get the news over the media.
“That was a very emotional time. I quickly got off the phone with a few of them because I knew the conversation was going to go pear-shaped from my end, and from their end as well.”
Moody also spoke of the mare’s sweet nature – off the track at least – and how his three then-teenaged daughters could ride her bareback when she was spelling on the family farm, and “play with her like a big puppy dog”.
“She was a big, strong, boisterous, cranky girl when in work, but at home it was just ‘flick the switch’,” he said. “She had a wonderful personality, and that attached to her brilliant racing career .. she had it all.”
Alas, as so often happens, the mare’s greatness on the track didn’t transfer to the breeding barn, though her best was ill-fated. Of her five foals to race, four were winners, but only one scored in town. The Moody-trained Invincible Caviar (I Am Invincible) won four of eight, including one at Flemington, and ran fifth and seventh in two shots at Listed class, before dying of a suspected heart attack last November.
Of her imposing frame that could take the breath away of those seeing her in the flesh for the first time, the great Bart Cummings once famously said she had “the neck of a duchess and the arse of a cook”.
It was that physique which so captivated Moody when he first saw Black Caviar as Lot 520, a yearling filly bred by Rick Jamieson of Victoria’s Gilgai Farm, and sold through the at Oaklands Junction for the Inglis Premier sale of 2009.
“I knew I was in love with her. Now I had to figure out how to buy her,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Werrett and his co-owners had specified an upper limit of $100,000. He went to $210,000 to secure her, beating rivals including Leon and Troy Corstens, who moments later asked – unsuccessfully – to buy half of her. Thankfully for Moody, Werrett trusted his judgement and forgot about the budget.
By dual Group 1 winner Bel Esprit (Royal Academy), Black Caviar would prove the high point of what became the great female family of Scandinavia (Snippets), the dual Group-winning granddaughter of a mare imported in the late 1970s by Kingston Town’s owner David Hains from the “wilderness” of Denmark, that country’s Oaks winner Love Song (Warpath).
While Scandinavia threw four stakes winners, including Moody’s Group 1 victor Magnus (Flying Spur), this filly was from her unraced second daughter Helsinge (Desert Sun), named for a town near the coast in Denmark. Her new owners in turn named her for that area’s prime product. Continuing the aquaculture theme, she would carry silks of salmon pink – with dots resembling black caviar.
Her career evolved as a seemingly never-ended loop of highlights. Crowds again filled racecourses, and millions watched on TV. Once, when she was in Adelaide to win The Goodwood (Gr 1, 1200m), an AFL match there was rescheduled so as not to clash with her performance.
There was her first Group 1 – Flemington’s then Patinack Classic (Gr 1, 1200m) in 2019 – when almost perversely she was ridden by Ben Melham in place of the suspended Nolen.
Four months later she took the Newmarket Handicap (Gr 1, 1200m), carrying a modern record winning weight for a mare – and the largest since 1906 – of 58 kilograms. Still only four, she’d won ten races by then and, amid ever-growing mania, her owners prudently took out copyright on her name.
“The pressure was building,” Moody later wrote. “You could feel it. Luke and I would say it was like being on a roller-coaster. It was exhilarating, but it was just absolutely hurtling down the hill.”
The streak extended, the media glare intensified, the pressure – on all but the horse – grew. Moody would later reflect he never went out on race nights to celebrate her wins: “I’d just head home, grab some fish and chips, kick my shoes off on the couch and exhale.”
There was no greater pressure than her 2012 mission to Royal Ascot for the Diamond Jubilee Stakes (Gr 1, 6f). Again carrying injuries, her participation was not even confirmed until hours before the race. Then, with millions of Australians watching in the small hours, Nolen flirted with infamy by nursing her to the line, before feverishly riding again to lift her to her 0.2 length victory.
Four days earlier, the great Frankel (Galileo) had stunned once more by winning the Queen Anne Stakes (Gr 1, 1m) by 11 lengths. Moody had “met” the great horse during his stay at Newmarket, when visiting Sir Henry Cecil’s stables. Cecil had responded by visiting Moody’s temporary home to visit the biggest “Wonder from Down Under” since Phar Lap.
She didn’t quite match Frankel’s all-time high Timeform rating of 147. But she did reach 136, and enjoyed spells as the world’s top-rated horse.
But she was about so much more than numbers.
For four unforgettable years, she held a nation in thrall.