Sam Kavanagh never gave up on a comeback, but died too young. He had one last wish

Sam Kavanagh paid the cobalt trials’ heaviest toll.

No one suffered more than the young trainer, who had grown up in Adelaide, left his father’s successful operation and moved to the cut-throat world of Sydney racing to make it on his own.

Jockey Jason Collett, winner of the Canberra Guineas on horse Interspersed, is congratulated by trainer Sam Kavanagh.Credit: Melissa Adams

He was disqualified for nine years in 2015 for race-day treatments and cobalt offences, a penalty he described as a “life sentence” that was later reduced to four years after a savings-sapping NSW Supreme Court appeal.

The case ruined his training career, and ended his relationship with his father, Mark. They fell out over evidence linking Sam Kavanagh’s cobalt positive to a vitamin complex solution supplied by their vet.

Even years later, in 2023, when Kavanagh was dealt the cruellest blow of all, diagnosed with stage four esophagus cancer in the middle of the year, they never made their peace.

“I have offered my parents opportunities to speak with or engage with my daughter, their grandchild, without my involvement if that helps them … nothing, I’ve moved on, no energy for that,” Kavanagh told clarkofthecourse.com website earlier this year.

Kavanagh died last Saturday, aged 38, leaving behind his life partner, Kelly Fawcett, and their 11-year-old daughter, Siena.

“I am absolutely shattered to lose my best friend and partner Sam Kavanagh of almost 20 years,” Fawcett posted on Facebook.

“I am very lucky to have a very amazing support network of awesome friends, family and great loyal understanding clients and I appreciate you all.”

Kavanagh was farewelled in private this week, and his life will be celebrated in public at a memorial service early next year, at a date still to be advised.

When that time comes, he will be remembered as many things: a larrikin with a beaming smile, a loyal friend, an ambitious trainer with a fine eye for a horse, an astute punter, a man of courage, and a proud family man.

Sam Kavanagh with Catapulted and Whobegotyou in 2010.Credit: Paul Harris

Close friend Will Freedman told RadioTAB that it would be a trying time for Kelly to look after Siena while facing the prospect of winding up their stable.

Kavanagh’s dying wish was that the racing world would look after his girls.

He asked friend and fellow trainer Ami Yargi that his partner be afforded time to grieve and that she might have something to put towards a “forever home”.

So far, a GoFundMe page started by Yargi has raised $55,000.

But no amount of money could mask the heartache that Kavanagh endured across the past 10 years.

Initially, he felt he had been treated like the “greatest cheat that’s ever been put into racing”. In later years, he took a more philosophical view.

“I am not upset that I got rubbed out because I deserved to be rubbed out,” he told Wolfden’s The Punt podcast in February this year.

“I don’t think I deserved what I got, but I deserved something. I am not stupid. I am not sitting here saying ‘this was an outrage’. I did the wrong thing. I race-day treated a horse, and treated it as a bleeder. I acted outside the rules of racing.”

Kavanagh was one of several trainers in NSW and Victoria, including his father, who were charged in 2015 after their horses presented at the races with elevated levels of cobalt in their system.

Until then, the family had been close.

Kavanagh had run the family stables in Adelaide from 2007 to 2012 – at a time when his former jumps jockey father moved to Flemington and took Australian racing by storm, winning the Cox Plate with Maldivian in 2008, and the Melbourne Cup with Shocking in 2009.

Throughout these years, Kavanagh referred to his father as a “role model” and credited him for teaching him how to train.

Kavanagh in 2023.Credit: Getty Images

But things changed when Kavanagh felt the urge to break out on his own. He left the family operation to take up boxes in Rosehill at the end of 2012. Success followed, but so did financial stress.

“While the horses were going well, as well as they could go, I’m sitting here thinking, ‘I need another 30 of them going well to make this work’,” he told The Punt podcast.

Kavanagh said he was paying $165,000 a year in rent, was burdened with a $300,000 debt from the Magic Millions sales, was struggling to cover payroll each week because a big client owed him money, and he was sleeping in a flat above his stables to save $500 in weekly rent.

Desperate times led to desperate measures.

“Not nearly as much happened as people think happened in my stable – but my problem was, and I have said this before, ‘I take full responsibility and don’t have any regrets’, but things happened, and I let them happen, so they nailed me to the wall,” he said.

“What probably should have been a two-year disqualification, or an 18 months’ disqualification, became nine years, down to four years after a court battle because the race-day treatments happened, and yet my cobalt situation – the two other trainers that were in exactly the same situation, I served four years for, and they served nothing.”

Kavanagh’s case was linked to Victoria through Flemington Equine Centre vet Tom Brennan.

Brennan was found guilty and disqualified for five years for supplying bottles of a “vitamin complex” containing cobalt to Kavanagh, his father, Mark, and Flemington trainer Danny O’Brien.

Mark Kavanagh and O’Brien were initially disqualified but exonerated 12 months later on appeal at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT).

It was during this 2016 VCAT hearing that Kavanagh provided evidence that pinpointed his falling out with his father.

He told the hearing that his father and Matt Rudolph, who was then the Australian Turf Club executive general manager, had organised a secret meeting in a Sydney pub to pressure him to change his evidence. They tried to convince him not to implicate Brennan in his case.

“Tom had convinced them he hadn’t supplied me with the bottle of vitamin complex that the stewards found,” Sam told the VCAT hearing.

“I was enraged because my father believed the vet over me.”

It was a tragic end to what had been a close and prosperous father-son partnership.

Mark Kavanagh, who now trains in partnership with son Levi, did not wish to speak when contacted by this masthead. Levi also declined to comment.

After the NSW Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that Kavanagh’s original ban was “plainly unjust” because he did not knowingly administer cobalt to his horse, his penalty was cut to four years, and he returned to training, first taking up boxes at Muswellbrook and later relocating to Newcastle.

What struck people, even as he struggled to gain traction – finding the right stables, the right horses and the right clients – was his unbridled enthusiasm to get back on his feet.

Freedman said that three days before his passing he was talking about going to the Magic Millions and buying horses. He always felt he was one good horse away from being back.

“Sam, for all his misdemeanours, was one who was very concerned about the direction of the industry,” Freedman said.

“He loved the game, and at times he felt like the game was not as in love with him as he was with it.

“But he had an internal optimism that was always infectious to be around. I am yet to find somebody that has known Sam intimately that doesn’t like him ... he was such an affable person.”

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