Free Best Australian Racing Stories by Jim Haynes

actions of Telford and fellow Sydney trainer Frank
    McGrath rather sneaky, while other racing men say it was a stroke of genius.
    The plot revolved around three great horses: Phar Lap, Amounis and Nightmarch.
    Nightmarch had defeated Phar Lap in the Melbourne Cup of 1929, but, the following spring, Nightmarch was defeated four times in a row by Phar Lap. Nightmarch’s owner, Mr A. Louisson, had been heard to say that he would take the horse back to New Zealand for the New Zealand Cup if Phar Lap contested the Caulfield Cup.
    In a conversation with Telford, Frank McGrath suggested that his great stayer Amounis, the only horse to defeat Phar Lap twice, would win the Caulfield Cup if Nightmarch and Phar Lap didn’t start. He suggested that Telford leave Phar Lap in the Caulfield Cup field until Louisson took his horse home. In that time they could get very lucrative odds about their two horses winning the Caulfield–Melbourne Cups double.
    The plan worked perfectly. Seeing that Phar Lap was set to contest the Caulfield Cup, Louisson took Nightmarch home and he duly won the New Zealand Cup. Then Telford scratched Phar Lap, stating that he didn’t want to over-race the horse, and Amounis won the Caulfield Cup. Phar Lap, of course, famously and easily won the second leg and the two trainers sent a battalion of bookies near bankrupt.
    Both Davis and Telford have been accused of over-racing their champion and Davis has been criticised for starting Phar Lap, against Telford’s wishes, in the Melbourne Cup of 1931, with the cruel weight of 10 st 10 lb (68 kg), and for taking the horse to America.
    Davis, however, seems in retrospect to have been a fair-minded man. He was grateful to Telford for finding the horse and allowed him to remain as part owner for a modest £4000 when the lease expired. It was also Davis who had Phar Lap’s skin, heart and skeleton returned to Australasia after his tragic death.
    It is also worth remembering that Telford had already won a Melbourne Cup with Phar Lap, while Davis had not.
    Myths develop quickly in racing as in other fields of dreams and the truth is often forgotten when fiction and films are created from fact. Telford has been criticised for leaving young Tommy Woodcock in charge of the valuable champion in the USA, but the fact is that Telford’s daughter had just died and he was organising her funeral. It is also true that a team of four, which included jockey Bill Elliott and vet Bill Nielsen, travelled to the USA with Woodcock and Phar Lap. David Davis was also in the USA managing the campaign. So the horse’s assault on the US was meticulously planned.
    It is a mark of Phar Lap’s ability that the VRC changed the weight-for-age rules in 1931 to include allowances and penalties, in an attempt to bring the extraordinary horse ‘back to the field’. They also gave him a massive 22 lb (10 kg) over weight for age in the 1931 Cup.
    Further testament to Phar Lap’s greatness are the sensation he caused in the USA and the ease of his win in the invitational Agua Caliente Handicap, in Tijuana Mexico, at his first start on dirt after a long sea journey and an 800-mile road trip. He was also recovering from a bad stone bruise to a heel and raced in bar plates for the first time—and broke the track record. That win, his only start outside the relatively minor racing arena of Australia, made him the third-greatest stakes-winning racehorse of all time, in the world.
    Phar Lap’s tragic death and the theories surrounding it have been well documented, as well as becoming entrenched in racing folklore. The nation mourned and the autopsy showed a severe gastric inflammation from duodenitis-proximal jejunitis, a condition exacerbated by stress.
    Later studies, as recently as 2008, showed the presence of arsenic in large quantities, which has led to all sorts of theories, ranging from Percy Sykes’s statement that all horses at that time had arsenic