MV On Track 2018

ON TRACK MAGAZINE 9 His confidence was born in that same spot in 2015, when the lean mare he then called ‘the filly’ proved him right in choosing her over her stable mate Preferment. When she shot through an opening and put lengths on international stars like Highland Reel and Criterion in 2015, he felt the thing that a further 21 wins in a row would prove to the world. He calls it the ‘X factor’. Ask Bowman about that moment, as he recently was for the authorised Winx biography, and he says simply: ‘A star was born that day.’ Nothing she has done since – remarkable as it is – amazed him as much as that giant leap to the top. As beaten jockey Damien Oliver quipped after the race, she was ‘in a different hemisphere’. Sport throws up a few transformative moments like this. A teenage Lionel Rose wins a world title from Fighting Harada. John Coleman kicks 12 goals in his first VFL game. Doug Walters makes 155 runs against England in his Test debut. Some champions flare brightly and flame out. Not Winx. She improved with age to become the Bradman of the track, trampling standards set by mere excellence. To see what she has grown into underlines how apparently immature she was in her first Cox Plate. Yet she was classy enough to win her first two races as a spindly two-year-old long before that. Racing is about chance. If Winx hadn’t got a hoof abscess as an early two-year-old she might well have run in the 2014 Golden Slipper. As her trainer Chris Waller says, had that happened her story would have been very different. As it happened, ‘bad luck’ got her turned out for months. She became stronger and as sound as any horse racing. The fact she was bred at all was an accident. Her dam, Vegas Showgirl, was bred on a former cattle farm in New Zealand when an obscure mare named Vegas Magic, owned by Kiwi training impresario Graeme Rogerson, went to his own ‘bread and butter’ stallion Batavian at Grangewilliam Stud. Sadly, Batavian dropped dead serving his first mare of the season. The quick-thinking stud boss, John Corcoran, called Rogerson with the bad news. The good news, he added shrewdly, was he could put the mare to his own stallion Al Akbar rather than miss the season. Rogerson shrugged and the result was Vegas Showgirl, a smart racehorse and a magnificent broodmare. Again, by chance, John Camilleri’s bloodstock adviser Peter O’Brien happened to spy Vegas Showgirl at a broodmare sale where they hadn’t bothered looking at her because of her unfashionable pedigree. He and Camilleri fell in love with her, paid big money and the rest is history. Champions have won at their first start the way Winx did – but most don’t. Eclipse did in 1769 and Black Caviar and Frankel did. But Phar Lap, Tulloch and Kingston Town ran nowhere at their first starts and the bush idol Bernborough only ‘won’ his maiden on protest. When Winx started racing she was a narrow, leggy filly, unfurnished and plain. She looked like a whippet. Between powerful hindquarters and deep girth, her flanks were tucked up so lean and light that in her three-year-old year she weighed only about 480 kilograms. This season she strips closer to 530 kilograms. For those who fancy the tale of the tape, Winx has almost identical ‘vital statistics’ to Secretariat, the racehorse by which all modern champions are measured: same height (16-2 hands), same massive girth, same ‘hip to hock’ and, astonishingly, a similar racing weight. But she’s sounder and free of the suspicion that goes with being trained during the era of peak drugs. Although comparing turf times with dirt track times between hemispheres is pointless, her fastest times bear comparison with any. So do the astonishing trial gallops the stable kept secret until the new book was being written. One of the things Chris Waller admired about Winx was that she would hold her weight throughout each preparation. She does it easy. Like the blazing middle-distance horse Vo Rogue, she has no false muscles. Plenty of rein. High wither. No padded shoulders. No pumped-up gaskin and forearm muscles. Like Cathy Freeman, she looks as if she was born to run, not to push weights. She looks better moving than standing still. It helps to be so sound, because so many of her endless thousands of Thoroughbred relatives aren’t. They are a nightmare of fragile components placed under the stress of racing pace.