Free Best Australian Racing Stories by Jim Haynes Page B

affection. They came to be loved rather than admired. Because of the way they did things, they made people feel good and the sport seem grander than it is.
    Schillaci was a great sprinting three-year-old, up there close behind Ajax,Vain and Manikato. He won fancy races and rewrote time records and humped big weights. This isn’t why he came to be loved.
    What endeared was the way he kept walking up, so honest, season after season. And the way, like Manikato, he stared down pain. In the end, his grey coat had faded to near-white, his galloping action had lost its fluency, and his walk had become a shuffle. Yet he tried as hard, ran as fast, and won as many good races as in his carefree youth. When he was entitled to cheat, he didn’t.
    As a six-year-old, Schillaci had punters standing around mounting yards clapping until their hands ached. When he won his last race, the Futurity at Caulfield last Autumn, Lee Freedman briefly turned away from the media scrum and said aloud but entirely to himself: ‘What a magnificent horse.’
    Rebecca Newman, Schillaci’s strapper, took the gelding to one corner of the yard and they clapped him there. She took him to the opposite corner and they clapped him there. This went on for ten minutes. And the glory of his win was grander than most of the crowd knew.
    Some of us had seen Schillaci at trackwork the day before. Hurting everywhere, he was. As he shuffled out of the stripping shed for two easy laps on the sand, one word exploded in your mind. Lame.
    Schillaci stumbled, lurched, slouched, and several times stood stock still, a ghostly statue, grand but worn. Lesser beasts, full of oats and bravado, pranced and danced; Schillaci just looked tired. When he came off the track, they lifted his forelegs into tubs of ice. As Rebecca Newman recalled: ‘You could almost hear him say: Here I go again.’ At the races next day, a famous trainer told Christensen: ‘I saw your horse this morning and he’s bloody near a cripple.’
    Some cripple. Near the finishing post in the Futurity, Schillaci laid his long ears back, much like a heeler about to nip a bullock, and beat Jeune and Mahogany.
    A few weeks ago, Schillaci was back at Flemington for another campaign. ‘He was going really well,’ Michael Freedman says. ‘He looked great.’
    In the dark, with Damien Oliver up and going only a little faster than even time, the grey hurdled a white bandage lying on the wood-fibre track near the 600-metre mark, landed awkwardly, and in less than a second, blew away a large part of his off tendon and all of his career.
    â€˜At first, I didn’t notice much wrong with him,’ says Oliver. ‘But coming off the track, I knew he was lame. I felt sick.’
    Rebecca Newman was waiting for them. ‘Damien said, “I don’t think Schillaci’s very well.” I looked down at his leg and thought, “Oh . . . oh, dear.”’
    John Van Veenendaal, the veterinarian who treated Schillaci, says the grey wrecked about 40 per cent of the tendon. The irony was that Schillaci had never had tendon problems. His trouble for two years was degenerative arthritis in the coffin bones of both front hoofs. Spurs had formed on the bones near the top of the hoof line. The gelding was also plagued by corns. Schillaci had grown into a massive horse, weighing 560 kilos, maybe more, and in the end his hoofs were just too small for his body.
    Early morning at Brackley Park, the Freedman property at Avenel, north of Seymour. The sky is a cloudless blue dome and the new grass sags under the dew. You feel cold and old Schillaci is warm to touch. He crunches on lucerne hay and flicks his ears to the slightest sound, be it a tractor or swallows nesting in the stables. He nuzzles you, looking for a carrot, then lays his ears back in disdain when you come up empty handed.
    Schillaci will live the rest of his life here because the Freedmans asked to keep him.