Rekindling Black Caviar connection to complete Peter Moody’s return to training racehorses
Peter Moody stood alongside Black Caviar during her remarkable unbeaten career. Now back after four-year absence, the trainer has made a stunning revelation about rekindling the connection with his champion mare.
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It was the rediscovery of things he’d missed that ultimately helped Peter Moody overcome losing so much. Family, travel and even just time to breathe soothed the wounds left gaping by an inglorious — and what Moody won’t ever call anything but unfair — exit from an industry that had embraced him with gusto as he rode the wave of success, only to toss him adrift when the wave crashed.
In 2016 Moody, forever linked to the mighty Black Caviar — a connection that took the lad from outback Queensland who prefers dust on his boots to shine on his shoes all the way to a meeting with the Queen — was banned from training.
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He was suspended for six months for what, in the end, amounted to incompetence.
As cobalt became racing’s scourge, Moody, in charge of one of the biggest horse racing outfits in the country, was found guilty of “unintentionally administering” his horse Lidari with a product that produced excessive cobalt levels.
Cobalt was and is deemed a performance enhancer. The science was then, and remains, unclear.
The ban came nearly 15 months after the positive test was made public, nearly 10 months after charges were laid.
Amid the legalese of the charges levelled at Moody after a single positive swab, the premise was a simple one — Moody had been accused of cheating.
Few words engender as much vitriol, and it flew thick and fast on and off the track as the news reverberated through a sport that has a long history of heroes and villains.
Suddenly Moody was both.
PROTESTED HIS INNOCENCE
The ban came after Moody continuously and vigorously protested his innocence, after hours and hours of hearings that spawned accusations and rumours and theories that tainted everything he had achieved.
The ban came as Moody lost his will to fight, as he counted the financial and reputational cost, and bowed, wrecked and defeated, to his fate.
“I’ve got no doubt I could have kept taking them on and fighting it and going through the courts but do I regret not doing that? No, because at the end of the day I was just physically and mentally rooted,” Moody says.
It has been four years since the ban, and now Moody is back, a better man, he says: a better dad, husband, friend, and maybe a better trainer too. He has got his licence back, having surrendered it following his six-month ban, and his stables opened on Friday.
He is hoping to have runners at the track by the middle of this month.
His recent weeks have been taken up fitting out his new boxes at Pakenham, where he will start training again, slowly but surely building not to where he once was in numbers, but maybe in respect.
There’s a sense of “I’ll show you bastards”, a renewed vigour to prove he wasn’t ever, and didn’t need to be, a cheat to win. It is, however, a dawn after the darkness.
Knockabout, hearty, hardworking, loyal, big, bold, upfront, full-on and full-voiced, but also sensitive.
That’s a scattergun of sentiments about Moody from those who have known him, worked for him, seen him at his biggest moments and those darker times. He could roll with the punches in a rough and tumble industry he said himself was “dog eat dog”.
But when the hits came during the cobalt saga, first from nowhere and then continuously, there was no avoiding the fallout. Big men do cry, and the darkness that enveloped Moody was new, but all too real.
“It gets to you mentally. It’s hard. I found myself in a dark place a few times,” Moody recalled. “Never, ever thinking about self-harm or anything like that. But you find yourself just breaking down, sitting on the side of the road with your head in your lap thinking ‘why is this happening to me?’
TOTALLY OVERWHELMING
“It all catches up with you and can just be totally overwhelming.”
One wintry night Moody found himself sitting at the wheel of his white four-wheel drive parked on the side of Wellington Rd as he tried to get himself home to South Belgrave.
The tears came in a flood. The fight was one thing, costing him in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and a hard-to-fathom interruption to his life’s work, the business.
But the accusations were another: the turned heads at the racetrack, the eyes refusing to look at him. That really stung.
“I’m not looking for a shoulder to cry on but the disappointing thing for me was peers and people I had worked beside in the industry all my life looking at me thinking and believing that I was a cheat,” Moody says. “Not only that, but thinking my success was built on that. That was the hurtful thing.
“I would have liked to think people thought my success was built on talent and ability as a racehorse trainer and a horseman.
“But all of a sudden blokes are looking at you, and blokes I have known and respected for a long time wouldn’t even lift their heads and say g’day. That’s the hurtful thing.”
Couldn’t he convince them, those people he shared so many chilly early mornings with talking about horses in the training tower, that the authorities had got it wrong?
“There was no use. You just knew, you’d see people drop their heads and walk the other way,” he says.
“Not all and sundry, but certainly a significant amount of people.
“The thing for me, I wasn’t looking for a free hit from any bastard, but why did I have to cheat? I was the leading trainer. I was probably the most financially viable trainer in the country and wining Group 1s, we weren’t a gambling stable.
“I couldn’t understand why authorities would think I cheated. And in conversation with one significant authority he said to me ‘well, people murder for the first time and they probably don’t mean to do it’. That was the mentality I was dealing with.
GENUINE BURNOUT AND HURT
“I was fortunate I had an unbelievably strong wife in Sarah and great kids at home who kept pulling me out of those things. They could see the wear and tear on me, so ultimately that led to the decision of throwing the towel in.
“I could have brought in a mate as a trainer to look after my business for six months, then swung back in. But there was genuine burnout and hurt. I just had to get right away.”
Retreating home to the hills of South Belgrave from the increasing angst in the racing world proved to be a rekindling Moody didn’t know he needed.
As Black Caviar’s trainer, as a 53-time Group 1 winner, the man in the hat on track with a cigarette never far from his mouth and the big team doing big things, Moody held a comfortable permanence.
But beyond the horses he was a husband, too, and a father of three girls, including twins, who had grown up with their old man there or thereabouts but not completely present.
The silver lining of this dark cloud was time to make a necessary shift.
“My family, my children, rightly or wrongly, they probably suffered a fair bit because I wasn’t around a lot. Maybe not suffered, but we missed out on a bit of a connection there,” Moody says.
“I’m really grateful, my oldest, Cara, is now 25, the twins (Breann and Celine) are 23 and the last four years they have really allowed me to be a part of their life, which I have enjoyed.
“They could have said, ‘Dad, you haven’t been here for the last 20 years and mum has raised us single-handedly’. And my wife, Sarah, she has worked her backside off, too, raised the children, has always been a massive part of the business.
“So it was as good a break for her as it was for me the last four years, of not having the day-to-day grind of looking after the business and the kids, single-handedly. The kids have become independent the last four or five years, so it’s given us some together, too. We have been able to travel and genuinely enjoy life, which we had missed out on previously.”
Moody’s connection with his kids was strengthened by sport too. Not racing, but football.
Breann played in the first AFLW match for Carlton and has won a best and fairest award. Celine started at Carlton but moved to the Western Bulldogs where she played her first game in the opening round of 2019.
If it wasn’t for his training ban, Moody might have missed it all. But instead he was front and centre, cheering loud and loving it.
“It sounds a bit corny, but I’ve enjoyed it and I would have missed a lot of it if I was still going full bore,” he says.
“When Breann played in that first ever game, Carlton versus Collingwood, here’s my daughter playing in the first ever AFLW game,
I was as proud as punch. Then to see her twin sister come out a couple of years later — to watch them play against one another, that was an unbelievable feeling. I’m really grateful I have had that opportunity.”
Good times weren’t new to Moody and the Moody family. It had just been a while.
The Black Caviar ride was an unforgettable piece of their history as the fast filly racked up 25 wins from 25 races, from the first at Flemington in 2009 to the final one at Randwick in 2013, with that famous trip to Ascot and a last-gasp victory after which Moody, kitted out in top hat and tails, watched the Queen pat his own queen.
Moody does the same — pat Black Caviar, that is — as often as he can.
“I see her up at the farm quite often. I’m up in the Hunter Valley where she is housed quite a bit looking at young stock. I always drop in and see her and give her a pat,” he said.
REKINDLE CONNECTION
Moody says he would be “more than happy” to rekindle his connection with Black Caviar and train one of her next babies if the owners wanted him to.
“I haven’t spoken to them about that, I would be more than happy to,” he said.
Moody relived a lot of the Black Caviar ride amid Winx’s unrivalled racing dominance.
The question was thrown at him a lot as Winx racked up win after win — which of the two girls was better?
“How do you know?” Moody says.
“All I say when people ask is you could put the records of all the great Australian horses for the last 100 years on a wall and she might not be the best but there’s only one there that’s undefeated.”
Black Caviar was one of the great racing stories: unbeaten, exalted, untarnished.
Moody knows he can never be that. His history has been written otherwise.
But he also has a second chance. For all that he’s endured in the past four years, the now
50-year-old hasn’t quite forgiven and forgotten, but has found a way forward, and back to where he believes he truly belongs.
“I had a chip on my shoulder for a long time, I’d like to think that’s gone and I can move on.
“I don’t agree with how my career ended, that’s no secret. Was I bitter and twisted? Yeah. S--- yeah.
“So I suppose I’m looking to earn back the respect of some of my peers too where I think, unfairly, I lost it too.”
It’s not just him though, which Moody knows now.
It’s a family move back into the game, the game that separated him from them in a way, a game that had its way with all of them.
FAMILY MOVE BACK INTO THE GAME
“There was reluctance from all of us, sure, thinking do we need to go down that path again,” Moody says.
“I’ve very much enjoyed my time away and reconnecting with my family and friends.
“My time management was very poor when we were going full bore, and that time to spend with my family and friends has been tremendous.
“But the enthusiasm from my family has been first rate and really given me great encouragement where that was a genuine concern, how they would feel towards it. They have been unbelievably supportive.
“I have learned a lot about myself in four years and I want to combine that with being a racehorse trainer again. At the end of the day it’s the only thing I know how to do.”
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