The Inevitable
Only a tiny percentage of horses can boast ten or more stakes wins. It doesn’t matter where they are, it’s a sign of a rare and exceptional animal.
At Launceston last weekend a nine-year-old gelding who’s already part of the Island State’s turf folklore wrote another chapter of his story by pushing his black type haul into double figures.
And there’s most probably still more to come to this tale, including possibly another tilt at the $2.5 million All-Star Mile (Gr 1, 1600m) at Flemington next autumn.
The Inevitable (Dundeel) clawed to a 0.06 length victory in the Conquering Stakes (Listed, 1400m) last Saturday, as a $1.60 favourite under the WFA conditions, atoning for his 0.5 length second in Launceston’s Newmarket (Listed, 1200m) the start before. In that handicap, he carried 61kg, his nearest rival had 57kg, and ten of the 14 had the minimum of 54. Such is the burden of being the poster boy for a whole state.
But The Inevitable has proven himself way beyond Bass Strait. Granted, eight of his ten stakes wins have come in Tasmanian Listed affairs, but he’s also thrived further afield.
At three, in the autumn of 2019, he won Flemington’s CS Hayes Stakes (Gr 3, 1400m), his fifth straight victory in his sixth start, and still his career high point in terms of stakes grading for a win.
That spring he returned to the mainland to win three in a row, the last two Moonee Valley’s Bendigo Bank Stakes (Listed, 1200m) and Randwick’s rich Silver Eagle (1300m).
All these years on he’s still going strong, his career laced with a trove of memories for his owners.
These include his second picket fence – six in a row at home, the last five at Listed level. His subsequent start brought probably his finest performance – certainly his biggest payday – when he earned $360,000 for a 0.9 length third in last year’s All-Star Mile (1600m), behind no lesser rivals than Mr Brightside (Bullbars) and Cascadian (New Approach).
He’s had a couple of changes of trainership, from Scott Brunton to Patrick Payne for two starts in 2020 and then back again, and then to another Tasmanian in John Keys last year after Brunton was put onto the outer by both the stewards and the taxman.
But still the gelding has performed, including on a first trip to Queensland last winter where he ran fourth in the Stradbroke Handicap (Gr 1, 1400m), his latest and best of seven top-tier performances.
The Inevitable now has 17 wins from 41 starts and, highlighting that he’s more than just a Tassie Listed hero, has earned $2,079,650. And his story is all the more remarkable given how he started, as told by his veteran South Australian breeder.
Alistair McFarlane, 79, owns Tori Park Stud in the Adelaide Hills. He’s wound down his breeding operations now, following some major health scares some eight years ago, but for 20 or so years he ran a successful boutique farm.
“It was something I got into on a whim,” he told It’s In The Blood. “One day I came home with four mares and two foals at foot, and my wife Patty thought I was crazy. I just wanted to know if I would enjoy dealing with the horses and I loved it – I loved the animal.”
The McFarlanes enjoyed early results through the mare Beat The Bullet (Bite The Bullet), a city winner of seven races they bought as a seven-year-old from Lindsay Park for $11,000 in May, 2000. She would bear them ten winners from as many runners, including stakes winners bred many years apart.
Beat The Bullet threw Hollow Bullet (Tayasu Tsuyoshi), who won two Group 1s including the 2004 VRC Oaks (Gr 1, 2500m) – on the same day when her half-sister Red Hot Mama (General Nediym) became a stakes-winner in the Myer Stakes (Listed, 1000m) for two-year-olds.
Tori Park gained a third black type victor out of Beat The Bullet – a full ten years on from Red Hot Mama – with the mare’s final foal. Aptly named Last Bullet (High Chaparral), she claimed the SAJC Breeders’ Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m).
The story of The Inevitable’s dam Gift Bouquet (King’s High) is strikingly similar, although McFarlane had not been quite so happy to acquire her as he had Beat The Bullet.
In 2002, the eight-year-old Gift Bouquet was entered for a dispersal sale, again by Lindsay Park, with whom McFarlane had a close relationship. Among two victories from 12 starts she’d been a stakes winner, of Victoria Park’s House Of Chow Restaurant Plate (Listed, 1250m), which sounds far more palatable by its registered name of the Oaklands Plate.
McFarlane was keen to acquire her, especially after missing out as underbidder on a few others, but things didn’t quite run smoothly.
“I thought I had some time, so I went to the dunny,” he said, “but there’d been a few scratchings from the catalogue. When I came out, I saw a mare being paraded from afar and realised it was Gift Bouquet.
“I started bidding as I was hurrying towards the ring. I was yelling out, ‘FIVE THOUSAND!’ and ‘SEVEN THOUSAND!’ et cetera. I ended up getting her for nine thousand.”
Then he saw her up close.
“I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, what have I done here?’”
Some horses are special enough to earn important-sounding nicknames around home, not as in “Daisy” or “Billy”, but like “The Black Horse”, or “The Good Horse”.
“I had a mate who lived at the property with us,” McFarlane recalled. “He called her ‘The Ugly Horse’.”
Gift Bouquet may have had a face only a dam could love, but she was sweet of nature and – it transpired – a powerful progenitor.
“She was well under 15 hands and she had just a terrible head,” McFarlane said. “But she’s the only horse I’d give medication to without putting a halter on them. Horses are dangerous bloody animals, especially when you trust them, but she was lovely.”
Gift Bouquet was in foal to Jeune (Kalaglow) when McFarlane bought her. She had that colt foal, but after she missed (to Hemingway) a few weeks later, McFarlane responded to some urgings to offload the ugly mare.
“Patty told me to sell the bloody horse, so I did, at a loss, for $2,750,” said McFarlane, who might just have some Scottish stubbornness in him.
“But then Patty went to Canada for a holiday so I phoned the new owners and asked if they’d sell the horse back. I eventually got her back for six or seven thousand.”
This non-oil painting of a mare was becoming expensive. But then she started to prove her worth.
That colt by Jeune, who at least fetched $28,000 as a yearling, was named Blahnik and won two of his first three at Morphettville up until January, 2006. Four starts later he won the Adelaide Guineas (Gr 3, 1600m) – one of his five stakes victories.
In 2004, for his second mating with Gift Bouquet, McFarlane put her to the US-bred Statue Of Liberty (Storm Cat), and bred the filly Elysees, who’d go on to win a Listed race.
And, reminiscent of Beat The Bullet, with a gap of ten years and eight foals, in 2014 McFarlane put Gift Bouquet to Dundeel (High Chaparral), and the result was The Inevitable. Now 21, she’d saved the best till last. This 15th foal was her final one before dying in 2018.
This time, McFarlane had done what he’d been told.
“I was advised by my mate Nick Columb, Arrowfield’s man in Victoria, and he said to put the mare to Dundeel,” McFarlane says.
“I said, ‘Why would I put my pit pony to your runt stallion?’. He said, ‘I’ll give you two reasons: One, the 17 Group 1 winners I’ve had; and two, it’s my observation that if you put a good horse to a good mare you’ll get a good result’.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll put her on the truck.”
Soon after the resultant colt was born, McFarlane had his serious health battles, when he thought he “might be cashing in my chips”.
Hence he had pared back his breeding and racing operations when the colt was sold at the Magic Millions Adelaide Yearling Sale in 2017, for $90,000 to Tasmania’s David Brunton, who would soon retire and hand over to son Scott.
McFarlane may have been in a fragile physical state, but was as headstrong as ever.
“I said to Patty, ‘I’m going to keep a leg of that horse’,” he says. “She said, ‘Mate – you’ve just had a brain seizure and spent three weeks in a coma; you came out of that and they couldn’t tell me if you’d be animal, vegetable or mineral; then you’ve had a heart attack and a double bypass – what the hell are you thinking?’
“Anyway, I snuck out quietly and bought five per cent for each of us.”
Patty was not reassured by early reports from the stable.
“Scott took one look and said, ‘What do I want with this little rubbish piece of horseflesh?’” McFarlane said.
“So he asked an agent to sell shares in it, and that’s how we now have 22 owners. And that little rubbish piece of horseflesh has now won over two million bucks.”
This horse has another nickname around the stable – “The Veggie”. That’s not an insult relating to his physical state, but is because Brunton’s children couldn’t pronounce “The Inevitable”, and instead called him “The Vegetable”.
And just as he’s fairly unremarkable to the eye, there’s little trickery about his pedigree.
He’s the only member of his parish – Dundeel (pictured below) over a mare by King’s High (Full On Aces) – but that VRC Derby (Gr 1, 2500m) and Australian Guineas (Gr 1, 1600m)-winning stallion has done well as a broodmare sire from little opportunity, with eight stakes winners from 88 runners at 9.1 per cent.
There are only two, unremarkable, bits of in-breeding involved. The ubiquitous Northern Dancer (Nearctic) is at 4m x 5m via Sadler’s Wells and Storm Bird, while Sir Ivor (Sir Gaylord) is at 5m x 5f through Sir Tristram and Ivory Dawn, dam of The Inevitable’s influential second damsire Bluebird (Storm Bird).
All of which may support McFarlane’s rather matter-of-fact philosophy on breeding.
“I had a mate into breeding, the late Peter Katelanis, and we used to have this argument,” McFarlane said. “He’d say, ‘You’ve got to nick this and nick that’, and I’d say, ‘Nah bugger that – breeding is all about luck.’
“And I’ve proved it was luck, with all my horses.
“That mare Gift Bouquet, you wouldn’t have given two bob for her. She was an ugly, unimpressive, unathletic little thing, but jeez she threw beautiful horses.”
Success is never inevitable, but McFarlane’s grand ride with this durable gelding is still going strong after all these years.