Andrew Rule: Gus and Angel, two rippers who have what it takes
While this tiny baby boy was battling for life at the Royal Children’s Hospital Butterfly Wing, a gutsy thoroughbred filly was horsing about with her mates in the Otways. But their journeys have a lot in common, writes Andrew Rule.
Andrew Rule
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They were born a bit more than a year apart, the tiny baby boy and the little thoroughbred filly.
While the baby was battling for each breath in the intensive care unit of the Royal Children’s Hospital, his heart racing dangerously fast, the filly was running in the foothills of the Otways with her mates.
The baby boy turned four last week, another milestone passed after a rocky start.
The filly is now a five-year-old mare. She has turned out pretty well, too, although not the way we’d imagined.
The little boy is our grandson Gus. The filly was the one that a bunch of us, family and friends, bought to race to celebrate that Gus survived 13 weeks in the hospital’s Butterfly Wing after being born extremely premature with heart complications.
We liked the idea that the filly was small but tough, a born survivor who bossed the bigger horses around in the hills at Wurdiboluc, between Geelong and Colac.
She was by a stallion named Wanted from a mare called Untainted.
Wanted and untainted. It felt like an omen.
Gus was desperately wanted but couldn’t be touched for weeks for fear of being tainted by infection.
It seemed miraculous he’d made it. We called the filly Answered Prayers.
She was broken to saddle by Brad Pearson near Barwon Heads. We asked him to keep her a little longer than usual to do an extra fine job of making her good to ride.
The idea was to spend a little more time and effort at that early stage to give her a better chance of a long and useful life after finishing on the track.
It’s the least that horse owners can do, to accept that another fortnight’s education before a youngster races might save many months of retraining afterwards. It might even save their life.
By the time Gus was taking his first wobbly steps, Answered Prayers was learning to gallop.
Her trainer Kathryn Durden said she was sure-footed and good to ride but not breaking any stopwatches at the track.
She ran an encouraging trial. But in her first three races, between winter and Boxing Day 2017, her best effort was seventh at Geelong.
“She just doesn’t want to be a racehorse,” Kath said quietly in the conversation every trainer has with almost all owners at some time.
Kath and her husband Craig won three Grand National Steeplechases with their great jumper Wells, and were unlucky not to win four. They know their stuff.
We tried the filly again with a new stable in case a change of scenery would delay the inevitable.
She ran a close fourth at Kilmore in February last year, trained by part-owner Paul Banks, regarded as the heaviest ex-jockey in captivity since Roy Higgins departed.
That fourth was the best result of her short career but it wasn’t enough.
In five more starts she always beat a few home but that was all. She was tough and strong and had “attitude” but, as Kath had said, she didn’t want to be a racehorse.
And so, late last year, Answered Prayers got a second chance — and a new name.
Not that anyone called her by her racing name around the stables. The Durdens had called her “Wendy” for short.
But when she stepped off the float at Red Gum Run polo farm at Armstrong Creek, near Geelong, the people there took one look at her registered name and dubbed her “Angel”.
The first time professional polo player Zac Hagedoorn stepped on Angel, he thought she had something extra.
She was strong and agile, better at stopping and starting than most of the other 21 “off the track” thoroughbreds he trains for Red Gum Run owner, Inge Burke.
Zac has another 10 ex-gallopers on his own account.
The “bossy” aggressive streak that can be a nuisance in a racehorse is often an advantage when channelled into a game that’s a lot like rugby on horseback.
With a ball to chase and “ponies” her own size to shoulder out of her way, Angel is in horse heaven.
She isn’t the only one. Her stablemate Bubblegum won “best off-the-track pony” at a polo tournament at Yaloak near Ballan last weekend.
Bubblegum is another thoroughbred who was sidelined from being a racehorse because she was small.
Now she is a star pony, worth far more than she ever would have been as a galloper, with the potential to play against the best in the world.
Hagedoorn, who spent several years playing professionally in the United Kingdom, reckons Angel and Bubblegum are shaping up to the high standards of polo over there.
Both are guaranteed long careers, followed by a retirement devoted to breeding another generation of polo ponies.
Of course, one swallow doesn’t make a summer.
The story of these two and their 30-plus paddock mates at Red Gum Run doesn’t mean that every thoroughbred, let alone every horse, is destined for a long life with a happy ending.
There always will be horses unsuited for rehoming because they are potentially dangerous to riders, other horses or themselves.
That applies not just to a percentage of former racehorses but to the thousands of feral horses damaging national parks, fouling watercourses.
What they deserve, as all animals do in a civilised country, is a quick and humane end without pain or fear.
Meanwhile, the signs are good and getting better. Polo is one part of a growing movement to retrain and rehome thoroughbreds no longer suited to racing.
Sam Gairdner, who has played polo and schooled horses for the game in Victoria for more than 20 years, has taken 90 horses “off the track” in the last five seasons, and has so far retrained close to 200 former racehorses.
But he’s not one-eyed about it. Gairdner also loves the idea of the racing industry’s new scheme of dedicating a lucrative show jumping circuit to off-the-track horses.
Guaranteed prize money for a show jumping competition guarantees a future for ex-gallopers suited for it.
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So much so that Gairdner the polo pro and his daughters are now also looking out for former racehorses that like to jump.
But polo, he says, is the perfect “high-octane” pursuit for former racehorses. The one sport at which they can reach the absolute elite level.
Which is why, over the Christmas break, we will take Gus to pat his Angel.
She’s a little ripper, after all. Just like him.
Prayers answered.