How Brae Sokolski jumped on board the Caulfield and Melbourne cups favourite
When Brae Sokolski was watching Sky Racing at the airport, a horse caught his eye. Three months and $1 million later, the horse is ready for the Spring Slam.
Brae Sokolski was at Sydney Airport. Awaiting a flight. He asked for the races to be put on TV. An unknown horse won at Eagle Farm by the proverbial mile. Sokolski sent himself an email. It said only one word. “Incentivise.”
“I don’t follow Queensland racing that closely,” Sokolski told The Australian this week. “I was in transit. It was in June this year, when we could actually travel. We were going to Narooma for a weekend away for my birthday. We were in the lounge, waiting for the plane, and I asked them to turn on the Sky Channel. For no reason other than I just love watching horses go around. I saw the last couple of furlongs of the race at Eagle Farm, where he won by nine-and-a-half lengths. I’d never heard of the horse but he did something you don’t see too often. It wasn’t just the margin. It was the way he was still going away at the line, untouched. I thought to myself, ‘F. k. That looked pretty special. So I sent myself the email. All it said was, ‘Incentivise.’”
A big weekend was had by all. “I got to the office on Monday morning and the email was there. Incentivise. I thought that’s right, I’ve got to look closer at that horse,” Sokolski said. “I took a proper look at all his runs. Spent a couple of hours assessing him. I had this epiphany. I’d never seen a horse do what he had done in such a short period of time. He’d gone from being beaten in a maiden at Toowoomba to beating some decent Saturday-grade stayers by nearly ten lengths. I said to myself, ‘There’s something special about this horse. I have to be involved. At that point in time, the horse wasn’t even in the Cup market. He was still flying under the radar. I got Steve Tregea’s number through a contact and basically cold-called him to get the ball rolling. It took about a week to get the deal done.”
That was in June. Now Incentivise is the $2.40 favourite for the Caulfield Cup. The $8 favourite for the Melbourne Cup. He’s only drifted to $8.50 for the Cox Plate because he might not suit up for it. If he does, the four-year-old gelding could pull off the first grand slam of Melbourne’s majors since Rising Fast in 1954. It’s heady stuff. Historic stuff.
Sokolski ended up $600,000 lighter in the pocket – but sharing 50 per cent ownership of Incentivise with Tregea. Since then, the big four-legged lug has collected $1.3 million in prizemoney and hit his straps like no-one could have expected.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant and yes, I expected him to do what he’s done,” Sokolski said. “I thought the horse had potential but I couldn’t possibly have predicted the trajectory from that point tow now.”
There’s more loot on the table. The Caulfield Cup, Cox Plate and Melbourne Cup have a combined purse of $18 million.
The cold-call
One email. One word. One serendipitous note to self from the 45-year-old property guru. If this was a movie script, there would have been sliding doors as he departed the airport lounge. “I send myself emails for things that are important. Things I don’t want to forget,” Sokolski said. “We were going to have a big weekend and I would probably have forgotten all about it. Come Monday morning in the office, there was the email from myself that said it. Incentivise.”
He’s no stranger to champion thoroughbreds. Sokolski’s won The Everest with Yes Yes Yes. He won last year’s Caulfield Cup with Verry Elleegant. He’s won the Cox Plate with Sir Dragonet. Verry Elleegant was this week named Australian Champ
ion Racehorse of the Year. The trophy is in Sokolski’s keeping.
“When I called I Steve I just said to him, mate, I saw your horse win. I love getting involved with great horses and I think yours has the potential to be a great horse,” Sokolski said. “I want to be part of it. Having seen that he was the breeder, the owner and the trainer, it gave me encouragement that I could either buy it or part of it. Because you’re only dealing with one party. It’s so difficult when you’re dealing with horses that have a big ownership group and so many stakeholders you have to strike a deal with.”
He added: “I wanted to target the Cup. The Melbourne spring. I had that in mind. I said that was a non-negotiable for me – he had to go to a Vic trainer. Steve understood that. It wasn’t in any way shape or form about finding a better trainer than Steve. It was about getting a trainer that was domiciled in Victoria. Especially with Covid, it was going to be a lot more effective to have the horse trained down south. That was part of the deal.”
Splinter to Incentivise
Tregea is probably the real hero of all this. He was the breeder, trainer and sole owner until June. He used to called the horse “Splinter” around their Toowoomba stables because he was so thin. He called him Incentivise for racing after hearing Prime Minister Scott Morrison repeatedly using the word on television. Tregea nursed and nurtured Splinter since the day he was born.
“He was a bit of a pussycat around the stables,” the old-school Queensland horseman said. “He was pretty much maligned for being a bit soft. Mainly because he was very late in maturing. He’s been a real late developer. Like, kids are normally mature physically when they’re 14, 15 or 16. Well, he would have been 22, you know what I mean? He was that late a developer.”
Tregea added: “He wouldn’t eat. He was a bit of a sook. He’d get shy around his own shadow. He was in and out of work about five or six times before he even raced. He was basically just a very, very, very late developing horse. Thin. A big, tall staying type. Quite a nice looking horse, but a horse that required quite a bit of fixing right up until he was about two-and-a-half. He was knock-kneed. Needed corrective shoeing. It was quite a bit of work between weening and just getting him to his first race.”
Winning streak
The Caulfield and Melbourne Cup favourite was a dud as recently as March. He’s only raced 11 times. First race: ninth at Ipswich. A seven-month spell. Second race: sixth at Eagle Farm, a whopping 16 lengths behind. Third race: eighth at Toowoomba. Then something clicked. Fourth race: First at Sunshine Coast. Fifth race: First at Sunshine Coast. Sixth race: He slayed ‘em at Toowoomba by seven lengths. Seventh race: First at Eagle Farm by nine lengths. That’s the race Sokolski saw at the airport. Eighth race: First at Ipswich by ten lengths. Ninth race: First at Eagle Farm by a massive 12 lengths. A well-deserved three-month holiday. Then the big ones. The Group 1s. Tenth race: won the Makybe Diva Stakes at Flemington. Eleventh race: won the Turnbull Stakes at Flemington. Next race: the Caulfield Cup on Saturday.
“You couldn’t imagine – we were at the stage when we thought he was never going to get there,” Tregea said. “All we could do was keep putting him to work, take him to a certain stage, give him another break then let him strengthen up a bit more and come back for another go. The peculiar thing was, when he came good, he came good in a big hurry.”
The Eagle Farm win, the one Sokolski happened to see at Sydney Airport, changed everything. “He just seemed to strengthen up and enjoy the racing procedure and the routine of it all,” Tregea said. “He just got better and better and better and kept on strengthening up. Once he had a couple of wins he thought, ‘This is a good caper.’ He’s beaten them more easily each time he’s gone out.”
‘I told him to go away’
Sokosli had one no-negotiable part of the deal with Tregea. Incentivise had to go to Victoria to be trained by Peter Moody. On June 26, Moody went to Brisbane to talk turkey with Tregea and watch Incentivise in the Tattersalls Cup at Eagle Farm. He saw a thunderous 12-length victory and told reporters, “Pretty impressive, wasn’t it? Obviously he’s a very nice horse. It’s been amazing what Steve has been able to do with him, and he’s had him from day one. The horse is where he is now. I just have to make sure I don’t stuff it up. That’s why I came up, to learn a bit about him and see what’s going on. You’d love the big races to be now but it is what it is. He’s a bloody nice horse and I’m looking forward to it.”
Tregea said of the cold-call from Sokolski: “Well, initially I told him to go away. Peter Moody got involved and the rest is history. I think Brae probably thought Peter might have had a bit more influence over me. The offer was made and I thought, the horse is going well, he’ll be in Melbourne, why not? It seemed like a sensible thing to do at the time. So far, so good. You can’t complain about two Group 1 wins since he’s been down there. You just keep your fingers crossed and hope he can keep it up.”
Moody has stuffed up nothing. Two Group 1 triumphs in two starts. Now he has the shortest-priced favourite in decades for the Caulfield Cup. The decorated trainer of Black Caviar has won umpteen prestigious titles but the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups aren’t among them. “Caulfield was my home for the best part of 15 or 16 years and I think I trained a couple of thousand winners out of there,” he said. “I would dearly love to win it. I’ve had a couple placegetters in the Caulfield Cup but I’ve never gone into it with a chance like this. I’d very proud to hopefully put a Caulfield Cup on the mantelpiece. I’ve probably got the right horse to do it.”
Chasing the spring slam
Rising Fast was splashed across the front pages of front all Australia’s newspapers when he took out the 1954 spring slam. Incentivise will get the same treatment if he takes the first step at Caulfield. But there’s a complication with his attempt to do a Rising Fast. He probably won’t win all three races because he probably won’t start in them all. There’s only one week between the 2400m Caulfield Cup and the 2040m Cox Plate. And then only ten days until the 3200m Melbourne Cup. Three gruelling races in 17 days may be one too many.
“I think you’ve got to be really conscious of doing what’s right by the horse,” Sokolski said. “You have to consider the wellbeing and longevity of the horse. Everyone has these romantic notions of trying to win the Caulfield Cup, Cox Plate and Melbourne Cup and doing a Rising Fast. It’s not that I don’t think the horse has the ability. He probably does have the ability and constitution to pull it off. But the big questions is, are you doing the right thing by the horse? It’s not just about having a massive spring and winning every possible race under the sun.”
He said: “I think the horse is still immature. He’s had a very, very long preparation. He’s basically been in work the entire year. As tough as he is and as strong as his constitution is, he’s not a robot. He’s not a machine. He has a breaking point. I don’t want to get to that inflection point and regret racing him too heavily. We want to be racing this horse, at the elite level, for years to come. We need to balance the car for the horse with the fact these races are there and he’s up and running and fit. Obviously the temptation is to run him in all three majors but I think Peter and Steve would agree it’s not the right thing to do by the horse.”
Tregea agreed: “I don’t know about him winning all three. I don’t think he’ll be running in the Cox Plate. Highly unlikely.”
Sokolski left the door open just a crack, though. “The proven thing about the horse is that he just loves racing,” he said. “He pulls up better after a hard run than a soft run. He’s so tough, so the prospect of potentially backing up into a Cox Plate the one-week turnaround wouldn’t necessarily deter us. It’s always been about getting to the Caulfield Cup and then reassessing. We are very wary about the horse taking on all three – but we’re keeping all our options open.”