19/11/14
It’s Emirates Stakes day at Flemington. The best thoroughbreds in Australia as well as some talented horses from overseas are appearing at the meeting. The Track Manager, Mick Goode, doesn’t know how lucky he is. He has more choices than a kid in a lolly shop. In the seven days before the meeting he can generally rely on a bit of rain and then he can add as much irrigation as he sees fit to make sure the track is exactly where he wants it on the day. For the record officially 4.6mm of rain fell in the previous seven days, 45mm of irrigation went on the track in the seven days before the meeting – and 8mm of that 45mm of irrigation went on in the 24 hours prior to the meeting.
The sun comes over the horizon on Emirates Stakes day race morning and the racing media are all over the track rating like a group of excited school boys. There’s millions of dollars of prizemoney on offer and there’s tens of millions more going to be bet by punters around Australia. The Track Manager goes “dead 4” and all the “schoolboys” can hardly contain themselves. It must truly be horse heaven. Just turn a tap on and irrigate the track.
But there’s a problem – it’s called the sun. Nature has determined that the maximum temperature later that day will hit 34 degrees. Flemington dries out like blotting paper, or so the story goes. Stewards arrive for the meeting and reckon that it’s dried out since that “dead 4” rating went out early in the morning and upgrade it to a “good 3” before the first race. Then nothing changes until minutes after the two Group 1 features are run and won and bugger me dead, by sheer co-incidence, the Flemington track has dried out further and stewards upgrade it to a “good 2”. Thank God that happened minutes after the Group 1 races and not half an hour before – or stewards might have had to allow some runners to be late scratchings due to the track upgrade and it would have had deductions in betting for late scratchings and all sorts of “tear your hair out” possibilities. The track is upgraded to a “good 2” officially at 4pm local time, 20 minutes out from the running of the second Group 1 race of the day – the Emirates Stakes. By then the horses are in the mounting yard. Bit late for anyone to approach stewards to scratch a runner. Phew – that was close. See how it’s all in the timing in the incestuous world of thoroughbred racing? Upgrade it 20 minutes earlier and we could have had at least three late scratchings in the Emirates. As it turns out, three of the horses engaged later in the day are late scratchings – Spinderbella, Henwood and Coronation Shallan. It seems on one of Australia’s biggest race days, owners and trainers have options to scratch over the firm track.
Meanwhile 2028 kilometres north of Flemington at a place 99.9% of humanoids have never heard of – Kin Kora – a man who has been licensed to train racehorses for “30 years”, Denis Schultz, is a worried man. He sends me an email in the very early hours of Emirates Stakes day and tells me he’s “not much good with words” and that “I am writing this on behalf of Central Queensland trainers” and finishes with the words “hoping you can help”. I rang him at a more sane hour than his email arrived to get more background to the story.
Turns out the 67-year-old trainer is pretty happy with his lot. Understandably he gets the racing dregs to train. You know – the horses that no one else wants. Most are a bit slow. “Limited” would be about the most positive word that one could use to describe them. In reality they are a bit like Denis and most of the Australian population – just battlers. The horses he wakes up to every day most certainly aren’t up to city standard – even in Brisbane, let alone Flemington. But he gets out of bed at the same time as Joe Pride does to train Terravista and his team, or that Philip Stokes does to put Hucklebuck through his paces. The only difference is that Terravista and Hucklebuck are racing for a million bucks whilst Denis Schultz is going to tracks where they race for $7,000 in total prizemoney – just $993,000 less. Still no complaints though from this Denis bloke. He doesn’t want to be at Flemington. Places like Gladstone, Thangool, Eidsvold, Gympie, Dingo, Monto, Mount Perry and the like are more his scene – and hence that’s where he sets off to each Saturday with his team.
After talking to Denis Schultz who has “14 in work but I have 18 boxes” the mob down at Flemington truly have no idea just how blessed they are in life in racing. Their Track Manager bloke has options, just pick a number and hit up the irrigation equipment, the stewards upgrade the track whenever they wish during the day and then trainers scratch their horses at will because of an upgrade. The same “schoolboys” that were excited on race morning about the “dead 4” track rating, delight in later getting scoops like so-and-so’s horse pulled up a bit jarry from the fast drying track. It’s all part of the theatre. “They” really don’t care about Denis Smith or his horses. He doesn’t rate a passing thought in their day, as he’s far from the madding crowd, so he’ll have to just look after himself as best he can. Whilst 125 finely tuned thoroughbreds cumulatively contest the nine-race card at pristine Flemington on the day, many thousands more horses around Australia aren’t so fortunate. They don’t have options. They race officially on a “good 3” track, which if the truth be known is really closer to “concrete”. Pray to God that the sooky horse that felt Flemington was hard on Emirates Stakes day never has to race at some country tracks around Queensland and elsewhere, or, on the balance of probability, the horse won’t be competitive in a $7,000 total prizemoney race at say Gayndah.
Put simply, the country racetracks of Australia have no such luxury as “rain” and “irrigation” before a race meeting. “What’s rain” is the commonly asked question in the bush, by everyone from racehorse trainers to farmers. As for this miracle called “irrigation” – whose paying for that? The race club that’s been operating for a 100-odd years, Racing Queensland, or who exactly? And don’t think that’s an exaggeration, because Gayndah track hosted the first Queensland Derby 146 years ago, in 1868, a few years before Brisbane’s Eagle Farm began hosting the race. In the end, the answer is no one does. It doesn’t matter. It’s out of sight and it’s out of mind. The industry is only interested about the big day at Flemington and accordingly focuses its tunnel vision on that Group 1 program. After that you have the other lesser TAB meetings, but no one in power really cares about country racing. It’s all a necessary evil. The powers that be turn up to country race days and meet the locals and are fussed over by the committee, like a nervous teenage boy taking his first sweetheart to the school formal, but the simple facts and realities are that if the horses weren’t racing there they’d on the balance of probability be inside a dog food tin. That’s the simple nuts and bolts of it all. You can call a shovel a spade if you so desire – but at the end of the day one is exactly the same as the other.
It’s well-documented how a couple of horses died after the 2014 Melbourne Cup and thoroughbred racing hierarchy immediately went into damage control. “We all love our horses” and “we’d never do anything to hurt our horse, they’re like family” – all this what I’d call “vomitable tripe” was the constant. I’m 59. I’ve been around racing all my life. I’ve seen things and heard things I didn’t need to see. I say nothing publicly, but I guarantee if my wife of 38 years ever wrote a book it would be a best seller – just with stories I’ve been told from across the three codes of racing that have never got to see the light of day.
All sound a bit far-fetched? Well let’s just keep it real basic. For starters, how can an industry purport to “love our horses” when trainers like Denis Schultz have to race on turf tracks that may not have seen a drop of rain fall on them for six or 12 months – and will never see a drop of irrigation put on them?
As a trainer, Denis even got “lucky” as a country trainer. He has a nice horse called Blaze To Fortune. The 8YO gelded son of French Deputy is as tough as old boots and has won 15 races from 74 starts for prizemoney earnings of $144,850. The horse was in fact the toast of the Queensland racing industry on Saturday afternoon, 6 April 2013, when he scored a one length win in the Bundaberg Flood Relief Cup, a $20,000 total prizemoney TAB race that Sky Channel telecast to bring the awful plight of flooding in that town to the nation. Wayne Wilson came out of retirement to call the race. Sadly just over 12 months later we lost Wayne to the atrocity called cancer. A husband-and-wife team from Gympie, Barry and Desiree Gill, thought they could win the race with their handy galloper Unique Fuse, but in the end, they had to settle for third behind Blaze To Fortune and Harney. And just to reinforce to us all about the brevity of life, we’ve since lost Desiree also after a race fall at Caloundra. And life hasn’t been all beer and skittles for Blaze To Fortune ever since either, with Denis confiding to me that, “He was out for months. I buggered him at Mount Perry. It was just too hard. They only race once a year. After I started him there last time he needed months off. They raced there last Saturday but I couldn’t go back there and race. The risk was that it would be too hard”.
But the no nonsense trainer tells me that it gets worse than that. “Gayndah nearly took the cake the last time I raced there. They paid a singer $5,000 to sing there, which is all well and good, but why couldn’t they spend another $1,000 and irrigate the track? Aren’t the horses more important than a singer? Then the club had a 90-minute gap between the second last and last race. That’s ridiculous. We trainers could be half way home instead of just sitting around. In the end the stewards ran the last race early so we could all get on our way. (Racing Queensland racetracks boss) Bill Shuck was there at the Gayndah meeting. I said to him that the track was too hard and that it should have been irrigated. He said ‘it won’t happen again’ – but that doesn’t help the owners. They give us their horses to train and they are looking for a return on their investment and when they pull up sore they say to us ‘why the hell did you take our horses there’”.
I asked Denis to give me some more insight into some other tracks in his area and in his typical no holds barred way he advised, “Dingo raced recently. They race once a year. It’s a bad track. It’s either hard or soft, there’s no in between. They all have big tractors on their farms. They could rip it up soon after the meeting and level it again and it would give softer ground for the following year. They are doing the right things with fundraisers and all that at their race day and that’s good to see, as they are helping people out, but what about helping out the owners and trainers who are supplying the horses? Emerald has a good grass track with a watering system, so why doesn’t Dingo stage it’s once a year meeting at Emerald? Thangool has a watering system but if it looks like rain, they don’t want to use it, in case they lose the meeting. At Eidsvold there are patches of bulldust around the track. Horses that are trained at the track know that – and it doesn’t faze them – but it worries visiting horses, so it’s hard to take horses there.”
I asked Denis if many of these country turf racetracks should be ripped up and be replaced with sand or dirt due to the constant drought conditions in many of these centres and his answer was an emphatic, “No, as a lot of horses don’t like sand coming back in their face, but at least after you’ve raced on a sand track you’ll still have a horse after the meeting”. Denis continued by saying “the (sand track) meeting at Roma is coming up. The place will be packed. It’s funny how if they throw some money at a meeting how many will have a go at their horses handling the sand”.
And through all this Denis Schultz is not just sitting in the background throwing brick bats at anyone who cares to stick their head up. You see that Kin Kora where his stables are situated is a suburb of the thriving port city of Gladstone in Central Queensland and he looks after the sand track at Gladstone. He advises his standard track maintenance regime so that anyone who works their horse at the track, or who visits the track to race their horses, come race day – gets their animal’s welfare as top priority. “Being a sand track it gets watered a minimum of three times a week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday are our gallop mornings so by watering it three times a week I can keep a bit of moisture in the track. If we are racing on the Saturday I’ll absolutely saturate it Thursday with three hours of watering which incorporates 12 loads each of 8,000 litres”. Asked where the water comes from, Denis replies, “the council, it’s from their town water supply”. He also notes “our (the race club’s) water bill is pretty high,” but makes no apology for that and sees it as a cost associated with running the business professionally.
Denis agrees with my suggestion that councils where these country tracks are situated need to do much more to help out the situation of rock hard tracks that haven’t seen rain or irrigation for months, as after all, it is the town or towns in their gazetted local government area that benefit from the visitors to their town for their race meeting. Additionally race meetings are seen as so vitally important to the social fabric of the community that it’s important the general public see horses walk off the track to await their next battle out on the racetrack of dreams, rather than watch a high profile country horse like Blaze To Fortune limp off Mount Perry.
And Racing Queensland needs to get mobile and do something constructive towards answering the concerns of experienced trainers like Denis Schultz. They have no problem getting themselves on television when a jockey gets killed telling the world what they are doing. And they have no trouble telling us what they are doing for prizemoney around the State. But on the issue of what strategies Racing Queensland and race clubs have in place to ensure that the country racetracks that haven’t seen rain and/or irrigation for six months before a meeting, one can only think that the silence from both parties is deafening.
It dawned on me after I penned this story that sometimes those racing at Flemington on a good 2 track don’t know just how lucky they are. Remember it even got watered with 8mm of irrigation the night before. Mount Perry, Gayndah, Dingo, Eidsvold and co may not see so much as a drop of rain for six months – and 8mm of irrigation would be akin to a flood, yet no one in authority seems to care.
But a bloke who loves his horses from a place with the catchy name of Kin Kora up at Gladstone and whose Gayndah Class 2 horse or his Dingo Maidener is his potential Terravista and Hucklebuck all rolled into one, thinks many people could do a whole lot more. And I must say after I spent 15 minutes talking on the phone to him – he certainly made a lot of sense.
Tomorrow on Justracing I’ll put up some ideas that I have – to address the problem yesterday or sooner.
Today on www.brisbaneracing.com.au there’s the first of two photo montages from the Gold Coast last Saturday plus other photos relevant to the above story that I took off the RISA website Saturday morning. On www.sydneyracing.com.au there’s the story on Sam Hayes kicking goals, whilst on www.melbourneracing.com.au Victorian racing is perused.