This Horse Got To Me

My passion for horses underpins my involvement in breeding and racing though I have never been sentimental about them in the sense that I don’t fall in love with them. I respect them and care very much that man does the right thing by the animals in his service.

One horse which has come close to melting my apparently stony heart is Cateclipse (6g Catbird-Shadyside, by Vice Regal). On Boxing Day he had his first start since being exported to California earlier this year, finishing 5th in a one mile US$70,000 turf allowance at Santa Anita, beaten just under four lengths. He was the outsider of eight and earned US$1,400.

A G3 winner at Randwick, Cateclipse had become impossibly hard to place in Australia – not good enough to compete with the best but too harshly handicapped if dropped down into lower handicap ranks. So the winner of 8-from-27 has found a new life in the USA where the class system has more flexibility.

Cateclipse was a super individual bred by the Morrisseys at their Retreat Farm on the western outskirts of Scone. When I saw him at the Classic Yearling Sale I urged Gai to buy him – he was tall and balanced, impressively strong, boldly marked, correct with a good action, a great outlook and a beautiful nature. He looked a man amongst boys and Gai duly agreed, paying a high Classic Sale price for the time of $110,000.

With a bankroll of $423,100 in Australia, Cateclipse stands as the third-highest earner to date by Catbird though, essentially, he was quite one-dimensional as a racehorse.

His dam Shadyside resided in New Zealand until sold to Australia in 1998 as a 12-year-old, in foal to Zabeel. Her earlier 1994 colt by Zabeel named Greene Street was at the time starting to get mobile as a racehorse, eventually winning 12-from-65 including G1s as a seven and eight-year-old. Cateclipse was Shadyside's ninth foal. Incidentally, Shadyside and Greene Street were both bred by Peter Kelly to whom I refer in one of my earlier posts, Racing Is Fun.

There were dozens of horses in my years at Gai’s which would have walloped Cateclipse for class and raw talent, but everything about him I admired, especially his physique and his patent honesty. I never tired of visiting him at his stable. I used to say he was one horse for whom I might buy a farm one day, though there was a long queue of people ahead of me who were dying to take him home at the end of his racing days.

On the last day of my six-years tenure with Gai, a Saturday raceday at Rosehill in 2005, Cateclipse was my final runner and he obliged by winning the last race on the programme. I felt like all the planets were in alignment and you can imagine what that meant to me at that precise moment, and ever since.

I pray Cateclipse does not suffer the ignominy of Surfers Paradise (Crested Wave-Lady Aythorpe, by Aythorpe), The New Zealand Horse Of The Year, Cox Plate and Derby winner who was bred and reared at Haunui Farm during my time there. When all hope for the horse was gone, he was shipped Stateside as a seven-year-old and raced there until he was 11, without ever winning or placing, in company as low as $4,000 claimers.

Whatever is left in Cateclipse I know he will do his best in California. I just hope his new connections appreciate him and give him all the TLC he deserves. If I win Lotto on Saturday night I'll fly him back home when he's finished. I’ll let you know when he wins one.