Free Best Australian Racing Stories by Jim Haynes Page A

in their systems, to theories of deliberate poisoning. Phar Lap had evidently been fed foliage cut down after being sprayed with arsenic-based insecticide.
    Two things seem certain: the well-documented symptoms the horse suffered are totally consistent with duodenitis-proximal jejunitis, and there was a lot of arsenic in his system. The rest is conjecture.
    Phar Lap was such a towering figure that the history of thoroughbred racing in Australia is divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ Phar Lap. All champions since him have only ever been ‘the best since Phar Lap’. So it’s entirely appropriate that this summary of our early champions and crowd favourites ends with him.
    Comparing horses of different eras is silly, but people keep doing it. The exercise was described as ‘folly’ by the US Blood-Horse Magazine , which nevertheless, in 1999, ranked the top 100 horses ever to race in America. The panel placed Phar Lap, on the strength of one start in Mexico, 22nd.
    When the findings were published, one of the panel recalled a conversation with Francis Dunne, who had been a placings judge at Agua Caliente and later a senior racing administrator in New York State. Dunne was asked, after Secretariat’s Triple Crown win in 1973, whether Man O’ War or Secretariat was the greatest horse of them all. He replied, ‘Neither: I saw Phar Lap.’

Why we came to love Schillaci
    LES CARLYON
    I AM WAITING FOR the bus after the last race at Sha Tin when the urger glides up on a rumour and a prayer. In the sultry heat of late-afternoon Hong Kong, he thinks he is Peter Lorre. Dragging on a fag, he first looks around for hidden cameras, then leans forward and intones: ‘I think I’ve got a really good horse back home.’
    Yep, it is the big one. And me thinking it would merely be some tittle-tattle about Macau acquiring a nuclear arsenal.
    He looks again and takes another drag. Before I can suggest we use the shoe phone, he goes on.
    â€˜They say he could be something special.’
    Why do they always say these things?
    Still, rituals must be followed. As with the other thousand times I have been told this fairytale, I effect deep interest and do a little Peter Lorre stuff myself. After all, the inference is that one loose word could see me being placed in quicklime by certain parties who do not wish me well.
    This, remember, is racing. Idiots will tell you it’s an ‘industry’. Well, it may be, but before that it’s a romantic comedy with a subtext of intrigue. Damon Runyon and Lewis Carroll write the scripts.
    Most of these ‘really good horses’ are last seen at Manangatang wearing pacifiers and toupées, and attended by chiropractors and remedial farriers.
    Anyway, this beast I hear about in Hong Kong has won but two races, a Kyneton maiden, worth $2925, and a mid-week at Sandown.
    All this happened in 1991. The horse was Schillaci, the big grey who ended up a folk hero and now will never race again, which means we are all losers.
    They were Lee Freedman, Schillaci’s trainer, and his brothers Richard, Anthony, and Michael.
    The ‘urger’ was Schillaci’s co-owner, David Christensen, a company director and accountant, a committeeman at Flemington and Caulfield, and a very upright gent. Only as an owner does he take on his Peter Lorre persona, although this has paled now that he has given up smoking.
    As it turned out, he had something better than a ‘really good horse’, and this had nothing to do with Schillaci winning eight group ones and two million bucks. Plenty of horses have won more races and more money.
    Jeune is a really good horse. So is Danewin. But these and others merely inspire admiration. Schillaci belongs to another order, the guild that takes in Vo Rogue, Kingston Town, Manikato and Old Super. No, I’m not lining these five up on ability; what links them is more mysterious than that.
    All could inspire