Class Rises to the Top

Harley Walden, racing coloumnist

By Harley Walden

Few sights are more stirring than a line of charging thoroughbreds, whether they are lunging for the line in the Melbourne Cup, or the Golden Slipper, or even a maiden at a mid-week country meeting.

But the real pleasure of racing comes in watching a champion, a supreme animal-a class racehorse.

Few days pass in the racing world when the word class is not voiced in an enthusiastic distortion of the ordinary.

And used often, loosely and indiscriminately, its intent is undermined.

Tacked on to the names of the many popular gallopers, its use is more an excess of fanciful twitter than a positive judgment.

Of the leading horses of the past 50 years, at best only a few have possessed racing ability setting them apart from the opposition of their day, and fewer still have had little more than some pretensions towards true championship class.

Carbine: by which all Antipode thoroughbreds are measured

It is not an outrageous assertion that on the racetracks of Australia there has been only one thoroughbred of unadulterated championship class-Carbine.

Here was the nonpareil, the linchpin against which all thoroughbreds of the Antipodes should be measured.

I am in no doubt that all would be found wanting.

Carbine was a marvel.

He raced four seasons and had 43 starts, winning 33, and beaten out of a place only once, more often than not racing on terms which pronouncedly favoured his rivals.

Among his standout performances were the 10st 5lb he carried to victory in the Melbourne Cup, and his first victory in the Sydney Cup when under 9 stone, he carried 12lb more than weight-for-age.

Four times he won two races in the one afternoon.

It is generally overlooked that following his brief and very successful stint at stud he went to England where he linked his name between past and present champion thoroughbreds for all time.

Two of Australia’s best loved and most successful racehorses unlike today’s breeding practices, breed the best with the best, fall into a category of those horses who out-perform their breeding, Phar Lap (1926) and Tulloch (1954).

The pedigrees of Phar Lap in its first two removes is commonplace and the bottom line is signally without distinction.

A gelding, sadly he was denied the opportunity of linking his name with the present.

Tulloch, likewise, had a bottom line notable only by it’s under distinguished character.

Yet, like Phar Lap, he galloped himself into the hearts of the Australian racegoer, scoring sterling victories in the face of fearsome odds.

He failed to transmit any of his own great racing ability to his offspring, and therein lies a lesson.

Every well bred horse, irrespective of his or her ability, may still transmit the genes of championship class; the ordinary pedigree almost always fails miserably, even when, as in the case of Tulloch, rare ability was possessed.

Both Phar Lap and Tulloch were “freaks”, each possessing racing ability far beyond the limits their breeding could have bequeathed them.