It can take you places, the racing game.
Peter Moody grew up on a farm near Wyandra, a spec near Charleville in western Queensland, population three men and a dog. I know this because, after writing his book with him, I drove through the place – dodging the kangaroos lying on the main street – and I heard the dog, wailing incessantly in some form of bleak predicament. It was the only noise in town.
Come to think of it, I didn’t see the three men. Didn’t see a soul, in fact, in this once-bustling village that in the mid-70s had eight streets and three pubs, a source of awful grief for the Moody clan, due to an alcoholic father who inevitably let the farm go.
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Fast forward and here’s grown-up Peter receiving a trophy from a little woman he towers over. It’s Queen Elizabeth II, it’s Royal Ascot, and he’s the trainer of the best horse in the world, Black Caviar.
In 1983, here’s another Queensland horse bloke, Steve Tregea, having a short-lived go at being a jockey. He’s winning a Cup race, but not one you’ve heard of. It was the Port Moresby Cup in Papua New Guinea, a long way from where racing exists as we know it, but proof of its appeal pretty much wherever people are.
In racing-mad Australia, the Melbourne Cup is not just one of the country’s most important and oldest sporting events. It’s on many levels the biggest “thing” we’ve got, our grandest, most historic, most enduring cultural institution. And now, Tregea and Moody are central to a remarkable story, and an astonishing horse who holds one of this country’s most charged titles: there’s the prime minister, the cricket captain, and the Melbourne Cup favourite.
If Incentivise can carry off the 161st Cup it will cap an incredible journey for the five-year-old gelding.
Only on March 27 this year, Incentivise ran eighth in a race on the bottom rung – a maiden (for horses who hadn’t won yet) – at Toowoomba, the home city of Tregea, the small-time trainer who bred and owned him.
That was only the horse’s third start. He’d debuted at four – two years later than most – after Tregea practised Zen-like patience in bringing him along slowly due to some dodgy knees that needed work. That first run was a ninth over 1350-metres at Ipswich in August last year. After a spell, due to a return of shin soreness that had also plagued him, he came sixth over 1400m at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm, before that eighth at Toowoomba.
Tregea says the form wasn’t that bad, with unsuitable distances and bad luck, but no one could have expected how Incentivise has bloomed since.
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At his fourth start, in April, he won a 1600m maiden at the Sunshine Coast, and he’s been winning ever since, a string of nine races, many phenomenal. Raised to staying trips he won his fourth, fifth and sixth in a row at Brisbane’s winter carnival – by nine lengths, nine-and-a-half lengths, then by 12 lengths in his step up to Group 3 level.
After the nine-lengther, Tregea received a phonecall. He’d been fielding offers to buy into or buy the horse, but nothing specific. This time, it was big time Melbourne owner Brae Sokolski.
Incentivise hadn’t been all that cheap to put together. Tregea paid $270,000 for his mother, Miss Argyle, in 2008. After seven earlier foals, a couple of them handy, he’d paid nearly $20,000 for the mating with Cox Plate-winning stallion Shamus Award that produced Incentivise.
The horse had won $87,100. Sokolski, heading a syndicate, offered $600,000 for half of him. Tregea would remain managing owner, but Incentivise would be transferred to Moody in Melbourne.
He was the budding star of the Australian turf. The future looked immense and Tregea was sitting on 100% of it.
“I hadn’t been interested in selling initially,” Tregea says. “I’d had him since he was foal, I’d brought him along very patiently, and he was obviously going places.
“But when Peter got involved, and there as a firm offer, I just said ‘Yeah let’s do it’.”
Incentivise headed south, off six straight wins, as the hottest horse in the land. But tougher questions would be asked as he met the country’s richest racing talent.
In his first Group 1, the Makybe Diva Stakes, he got the job done over the 1600m, by a long neck. He stepped up to the more suitable 2000m in the G1 Turnbull, also at Flemington, billed as a match-race between him and Horse of the Year Verry Elleegant. She struggled into fourth while Incentivise fought back to beat off Young Werther in the straight in breathtaking fashion, winning by half a length.
He was one of the shortest favourites for the 2400m Caulfield Cup in recent memory – at $2.30. Horrifically, he drew barrier 18, but his now regular partner Brett Prebble merely let him roll forward and sat wide just behind the pace most of the way, and he brained them in the straight to win by 3.5 lengths.
He’s now won $4.6 million, and is a ridiculously short $2.30 to win and double that tally in his rise to 3200m in the big one.
In cricket, they say you shouldn’t compare anyone to Bradman. In racing, it’s his contemporary, Phar Lap. But Incentivise is now the shortest-priced favourite since the Red Terror, who won at the equivalent of $1.73, in 1930.
So how’s Tregea feeling, considering all this could’ve been his?
“I’m very bloody relaxed,” he laughs from his farm overlooking the bucolic Darling Downs.
“Someone else is doing the training. Someone else is dealing with all that pressure. And if it was me, I’d be down there, away from home, out of my environment, phone doesn’t stop ringing. Actually it doesn’t stop ringing now, and every second call is the media, but I don’t mind so much because I’m up here.
“Plus, our main goal with him this spring was the Caulfield Cup, and we’ve won that. So anything he does on Tuesday is a bonus.
“But it is pretty exciting. It feels like the whole of Toowoomba is on him. In fact, the whole of the state.”
If he can carry Prebble, half the nation, and most of Queensland to victory, Incentivise could be a movie title one day. For now, the analysis of the physical specimen has begun.
Like Phar Lap and American champion Secretariat, who were autopsied, most would assume a massive heart drives Incentivise on, lets him kick clear at the end of a Caulfield Cup like it’s a 400m dash, or fight back when challenged.
Tregea laughs as he reveals the turf sensation’s somewhat peculiar personality, something that made him less than a favourite member of his stable early on.
“Heart as big as Phar Lap? We’ve always joked about the fact he’s probably got a heart as big as a pea. He’s a bit of a sook,” he says, explaining the horse’s aversion to going into certain areas.
“There’s a lane up to the swimming pool at Clifford Park. He wouldn’t walk up that, or go into the hose-down bay.
“His first time at Eagle Farm he wouldn’t walk into the saddling paddock. He wouldn’t walk to the north. I’ve no idea why. Maybe because of the crowd, who knows? I had to walk him round about 15 times to get him comfortable.
“All horses have got something, and that was one annoying thing he had. It used to piss us off severely in fact.
“It starts somewhere. They’ve got long memories, horses. The first time it happened I had a knock-down drag-out fight with him – that I didn’t win! Finally, I found the way to do it with this rope.”
Tregea reverted to a mere 5-millimetre length of string, often used to cajole a foal, which is looped around a horse’s rump and held by the person holding the lead rope, to exert a tiny bit of pressure from behind. It did the trick.
“It became a bit of a comfort thing for him. He wouldn’t’ go anywhere without it, so I sent it to Melbourne with him, and told Peter whoever’s handling him should have it in their pocket, and if he decides not to go somewhere, just throw it over his rump and he’ll follow you anywhere. They’ve used it too.
“In that respect he’s regarded as a bit of a pussycat. He’s not considered particularly brave around our place.”
So the raging Melbourne Cup favourite, winner of now nine in a row, is a 500kg, pea-hearted sook who can be controlled with a bit of string around his rear?
A loose summation, perhaps, but it’s good that his bad habits are also a show of assertiveness, which is handy in competition. And when galloping fast, it seems white line fever kicks in – the body and its capabilities overcoming any softs spots of the mind.
“He’s tough to beat when he’s running, and that’s obviously a consequence of his physical attributes that he’s got no control over,” Tregea says.
“And he must really enjoy it, because he does it so easily. And he doesn’t pull up puffing. He’s not an overly robust horse to look at, though he is tall, and while we might joke about his heart, he’s very athletic and he can find the line, so he’s obviously got a huge set of lungs and huge heart.”
Covid restrictions mean Tregea can’t be trackside on Tuesday. None of the horses he trains is running, so the phlegmatic Queenslander will be on his sofa as he tries to take this next chapter in.
“He’s won three Group 1s in a row, so that’s a rather surreal feeling,” he says. “Still, that’s kind of been expected of him, so it’s not too much of a surprise.
“But the story in its entirety is quite unreal, isn’t it?”
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Trevor Marshallsea is the best-selling author of Makybe Diva and Winx – Biography of a Champion. Click on the links to purchase yours.
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