Andrew Rule: Champion trainer David Vandyke finds his greatest triumph after a chaotic life
David Vandyke’s affinity with horses and ability as a champion trainer endures. But in beating addictions, his star charge Alligator Blood’s result in the $1 million Australian Guineas pales into insignificance, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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When Alligator Blood raced in the $1 million Australian Guineas on Saturday didn’t matter as much to his trainer as a watcher might think.
While his horse crossed the line first, David Vandyke won something two decades ago that shades trophies and money. His life.
Sports winners roll out the cliche about taking it “a week at a time” but the trainer now known as Vandyke literally does take life one day at a time.
Every day is a step further from the damaged and self-destructive man he was until he stopped blocking out the demons of a bleak childhood with alcohol and drugs.
One day in 1997, a man walking his dog noticed a parked car in a lonely spot outside Newcastle.
The motor was going and the driver was slumped inside.
A pipe jammed in the exhaust was pumping carbon monoxide into the vehicle.
The dog walker tore open the door, dragged out the unconscious figure, called an ambulance and saved Vandyke’s life.
A helicopter flew him to Sydney and he ended up in a psychiatric ward for weeks, but he survived without brain damage.
Almost dying made him want to live. He hasn’t wasted his second chance.
When we caught up with Vandyke at Alligator Blood’s temporary quarters at the McEvoy stables at Flemington mid-week, he was helping set up a security camera outside the horse’s stall, then heading to an Ascot Vale gym, followed by a healthy lunch and a pilates class.
He is that rare thing, a trainer almost as fit as his horses. One horse especially.
Alligator Blood’s entry to the big time has franked the rise of perhaps the most remarkable trainer since his old friend Chris Waller arrived from New Zealand to build a reputation through sheer willpower and work.
While Waller is still a high-functioning workaholic, Vandyke has kicked his addictions, which began with pinball and gambling as a teenager, moving to alcoholism and heroin.
He hasn’t consumed anything stronger than green tea in many years.
Neither has Alligator Blood, who despite the carnivore name is strictly vegetarian and permanently celibate.
The handsome gelding, “Al” to his friends, is a good advertisement for his trainer’s ideas on health and fitness.
Before Saturday’s race, Alligator Blood had won nine of his 10 starts, most notably the two-horse war with the brilliant New Zealander Catalyst at Flemington two weeks ago.
Catalyst went within a nostril of winning that day, earning so much admiration he was favourite at stages during the week.
The Kiwi horse and his trainer, Clayton Chipperfield, are writing their own fairy tale.
That they should race Alligator Blood twice in a fortnight is something promoters dream of but cannot orchestrate.
So outstanding is Catalyst, and so good was the Guineas field, and so gruelling was the Catalyst-Alligator Blood showdown on February 15, that a loss wouldn’t have hurt Alligator Blood’s growing cult status.
Great horses, from Phar Lap to Secretariat to Winx, lost a handful of races.
Rarely do they win at their first start the way Alligator won his. People still talk about it.
Whether wonderful three-year-olds such as Alligator Blood and Catalyst step up as older horses is yet to be seen.
But if “Al” keeps improving after he turns four this spring, he could end up on a list of Queensland legends with Bernborough, Gunsynd and the revered “local hero” Picnic In The Park, who won 21 straight races in Queensland, including two races on one day in 1984.
Winx was an honorary Queenslander, part-owned by Brisbane businessman Peter Tighe. She wasn’t bred in Queensland but was sold there as a yearling and began her four-year run of 33 straight wins at the Sunshine Coast, where Vandyke trains Alligator Blood.
His Caloundra stables are where he has reinvented himself in the four years since quitting Warwick Farm in Sydney’s crowded west.
It’s not as if he was retreating from failure in the city: at the time he had just turned the bargain buy Yankee Rose into a Group One winner, racing’s Cinderella story of 2016.
Vandyke nurtured the injury-prone little filly to run second to boom colt Capitalist in the 2016 Golden Slipper and third behind Winx in the Cox Plate.
Pretty good for a “pony” who’d been knocked down for $10,000 at sales where no one wanted her.
Vandyke’s back story is known in racing circles. He has told it before, unflinchingly.
Now Alligator Blood’s cult status is taking it to a wider audience.
David’s father, Vic Hayes, was once a wealthy butcher with a chain of shops in Sydney that bought him the trappings of success like a house in Bellevue Hill, near the Packer mansion.
But Vic Hayes was a flawed man and tortured soul.
He had driven the son of his first marriage to suicide before David was born.
The middle-aged Hayes had remarried, to the young and beautiful and artistic woman who became David’s mother.
Hayes Sr wasted his fortune trying to breed a Golden Slipper winner, sending dozens of mares to the most expensive stallions without success.
If there was a silver lining, early exposure to horses infected young David with a love of animals.
He ignored his father’s demands that he be a lawyer and he couldn’t handle the science subjects he needed to be a veterinary surgeon.
The father’s cruelty had wormed into the lonely boy’s brain. He wanted something to fill the hole in his soul.
In his teens, he was addicted to pinball machines, then gambling.
At 17, he went to Gamblers Anonymous. Then came the alcohol, then the drugs.
One addiction replaced another. But nothing killed his love of horses.
After leaving Scots College, he learned the basics of handling horses from the great trainer Neville Begg before moving on to work with others, notably Les Bridge and Tim Martin in Sydney, Laurie Laxon and Graeme Rogerson in New Zealand.
He learned fast and well but none of it pleased his father, who was venomous.
“He told me over and over, ‘All you have ever done is let me down — you’re nothing but a disappointment’,” Vandyke says.
Somehow, despite his chaotic life, his affinity with animals and ability as a trainer came through.
He got his trainer’s licence at 21 and within a year was leading the Kembla Grange trainers’ premiership.
Horses trusted him and, remarkably, so did owners. His lack of guile shines through.
He went to Randwick, ended up with another stable at Warwick Farm, and trained up to 70 horses.
He was prominent enough that his stable was targeted by “nobblers” who also got at horses trained by Bart Cummings, Brian Mayfield-Smith and other big trainers.
The crooks would tape a drug powder to a small pebble and then get a horse to swallow it. The stomach juices would dissolve the tape and the drug would enter the horse’s system three days later, in time to alter the outcome of a race.
Depending on the drug used, it would “stop” a favourite or enhance the performance of an unfancied horse.
The “stopper” was a beta-blocker normally used by heart patients.
The “goer” was etorphine, the notorious “elephant juice” introduced from America and abused in West Australian racing in the 1980s.
It was etorphine that stewards found when they swabbed two of the young trainer’s gallopers in 1989.
A corrupt stablehand had been administering the drug to horses.
But under the “catch-all” rules that make licensed trainers responsible by default, it was David who was disqualified.
Banned from the track, he worked on horse studs.
It could easily have been the end of him, literally as well as professionally.
Remarkably, he came back. Loyal owners who knew the truth brought horses to him because they knew he got the best out of them — and was honest about their prospects.
One day at the races, he got a call to say his father had died. He felt a weight had lifted.
He and his mother burned a painting she had done of the man who had made their lives miserable.
David changed his surname from Hayes to Vandyke, his mother’s family name. He was a new man.
The other big change was the decision to leave Sydney, where he had seen the pressure consume people and change them for the worse.
He wanted to be part of a smaller community where he could grow old happily. So, in 2016, he arrived at the Sunshine Coast with what one owner describes “as a suitcase and a bridle”.
Of course, in the bridle was Yankee Rose, gun filly of her year.
Heather Brown, whose forebears bred two Melbourne Cup winners, breeds thoroughbreds with her veterinary surgeon husband David Pascoe. They met Vandyke soon after he arrived.
They soon switched their home-bred horses from a leading Brisbane stable to the quiet man who told them he got along with horses better than with owners.
“We saw his gifts straight up,” Brown recalls.
“Horses relate to him in the most extraordinary way. He is the man who listens to horses.
“His love and care of a horse is extraordinary: his relationship with a horse ranks much higher than his relationship with its owner.
“He will sit in a box with a troubled horse for hours, watching, thinking, listening, until he figures it out.
“His horses run because they want to, because he has the patience to make them want to be brave and confident.”
The results for the Pascoes were astonishing. Under Vandyke’s care, their five horses have had 40 starts for 11 wins and 11 placings, including two “black type” races.
Word spread, which is why Albury businessman Allan Endresz and his relatives Jeff and Robyn Simpson sent young horses to him.
The one they called Alligator Blood has astonished everyone with every start.
When the horse flew to Melbourne for this campaign, Vandyke flew with him in the cargo hold.
Win, lose or draw, horses matter more to him than glittering prizes.
It’s in the blood.
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