Black Caviar: 19 Wins in a Row, Britain Bound at Linesmaker

BRISBANE, Aus­tralia — Peter Moody was stand­ing around some of Australia’s best thor­ough­breds at his soggy sta­bles in Mel­bourne, but had time to take a tele­phone call inquir­ing about one of them.

As usual, it was about Black Caviar.

The 5-year-old mare owned by a con­sor­tium of fam­i­lies and friends, some Melbourne-area veg­etable grow­ers, has won 19 races in 19 starts.

She’ll get a chance to make it 20 in a row after Moody nom­i­nated Black Caviar to run April 28 at Mor­phettville in South Aus­tralia state. Then she’ll take her sprint show over­seas to Britain’s Royal Ascot in late June.

With an offi­cial web­site, Twit­ter account and Face­book page ded­i­cated to Black Caviar, her rep­u­ta­tion has already spread far and wide.

The bay horse born near Mel­bourne in August 2006 has an impres­sive pedi­gree. The most pro­duc­tive sire of the 20th cen­tury, Cana­dian cham­pion North­ern Dancer, is on both her sire and her dam’s side.

But the own­ers, with trainer Moody guid­ing them, didn’t rush Black Caviar’s career early. She won two races as a 2-year-old, three as a 3-year-old and eight as a 4-year-old last year, includ­ing six Group 1 races.

“She stands out, that’s for sure,” Moody told The Asso­ci­ated Press in a tele­phone inter­view. “There isn’t any­one in rac­ing who doesn’t know about her, and now that’s expanded to a lot of the gen­eral population.”

Black Caviar’s 19th win – on Feb. 18 with reg­u­lar jockey Luke Nolen aboard – came in the 1,000-meter Light­ning Stakes at Flem­ing­ton in Mel­bourne, fin­ish­ing just 0.03 sec­onds out­side the course record.

Before and after the race, Black Caviar had thou­sands of extra fans gath­ered around her, try­ing to catch a glimpse of the sprint star. Par­ents propped chil­dren up in front of her, then quickly took pho­tos with their mobile phones.

That win equaled an Aus­tralian record that had lasted nearly a cen­tury – Desert Gold won 19 con­sec­u­tive races between 1915 and 1917 and Gloam­ing did the same between 1919 and 1921.

Moody is not sur­prised by the atten­tion, given he’s had a chance to get used to it from the ground floor. He bought the filly sired by Bel Esprit for $ 225,000 at the Mel­bourne pre­mier year­ling sales, then encour­aged a few friends he had raced horses with before to form a syndicate.

Pam Hawkes, a Morn­ing­ton Penin­sula potato farmer, was one of those lucky ones who came on board and named the filly. Hawkes had a pen­chant for black caviar.

“Helsinge, the name of Black Caviar’s mother, was in Scan­di­navia and that’s where the salmon live. It made sense,” Hawkes told local media then. The daugh­ter of another syn­di­cate mem­ber came up with the col­ors – salmon with black spots, as in caviar.

Jannene Mad­den, who owns a share with hus­band Colin, said the Black Caviar team is lov­ing every minute of the experience.

“It is a won­der­ful jour­ney, who would have thought we would be part of it?” she said. “This horse has cap­tured the spirit of Australia.”

Bart Cum­mings, the 84-year-old doyen of Aus­tralian train­ers whose horses have won the Mel­bourne Cup 11 times, says there’s no sure thing in horse rac­ing, but Black Caviar comes close.

But Cum­mings also said, “Can’t lose? I’d say so,” when one of his horses came up against Black Caviar in the star sprinter’s 18th race. Yes, yet another Black Caviar win.

“She’s pretty good. She has a great turn of foot,” the always-understated Cum­mings said at the time.

Cum­mings describes her as an “excit­ing mare” but holds back any glow­ing endorse­ments, telling the that he doesn’t wish to com­ment on a horse he doesn’t train.

Tom Water­house is an Aus­tralian book­maker and grand­son of 90-year-old Bill Water­house, an Aus­tralian rac­ing fig­ure for more than 60 years. Bill Water­house can remem­ber watch­ing the great Aus­tralian geld­ing Phar Lap, who won 14 straight races in 1930–31, a feat over­taken by Black Caviar five races ago.

“He said he’d seen both Black Caviar and Phar Lap race and that Black Caviar was the bet­ter horse, the bench­mark horse,” Tom Water­house said, refer­ring to com­ments in a let­ter his grand­fa­ther wrote to Moody.

“I guess you could say that Aus­tralia has the best sprint­ers in the world, and she’s the best. Her length of stride, it looks as if at many points in a race she’s not being tested.”

Water­house said that Black Caviar is great for the sport of rac­ing, even if she’s “a horse that’s hard for book­ies, because she never loses.”

If Moody’s nom­i­na­tion holds, Black Caviar will be mak­ing her first race appear­ance in 2 1/2 months – and seek her 20th straight win – in the Sport­ing­bet Clas­sic Stakes at the Mor­phettville track in sub­ur­ban Ade­laide. The Clas­sic is a 1,200-meter, Group 1 race that Moody fig­ures will set up his horse for her inter­na­tional debut in the Dia­mond Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot out­side Lon­don on June 23.

The six-furlong British race is held on the fifth and final day at Royal Ascot and is part of the Global Sprint Challenge.

The horse’s allure had law­mak­ers in sev­eral Aus­tralian states try­ing to get Black Caviar to one of their tracks, but Moody wanted to be firm with her sched­ule. He even turned down an offer to race her in Dubai on the way to Lon­don, say­ing he didn’t want the horse away from her home sta­ble for up to four months.

“I have put ‘Nelly’ in the pad­dock, at a des­ti­na­tion that I’m not dis­clos­ing as the mare deserves some peace and quiet for the next cou­ple of weeks,” Moody said in a recent col­umn in a Mel­bourne news­pa­per. “There’s noth­ing wrong with her. To the con­trary, she’s at the top of her game.”

Moody says Black Caviar will have nearly 2 1/2 weeks off at his sta­bles at Caulfield in Mel­bourne before fly­ing to Eng­land three weeks before the Dia­mond Jubilee Stakes. And Black Caviar could race again in Britain on July 14 at New­mar­ket in the July Cup, another leg of the Global Sprint Challenge.

“Every­thing is being tai­lored like a Sav­ile Row suit to have her cherry ripe for that race on June 23,” Moody said.