'Alas, as so often happens, Black Caviar’s greatness on the track didn’t transfer to the breeding barn, though her best was ill-fated'

Thoroughbred phenomenon Black Caviar’s final foal, a colt by Snitzel, will be reared as an orphan after the unbeaten mare was euthanised on Saturday owing to a severe hoof problem.

The great Peter Moody-trained sprinter and folk hero – who won a perfect 25 from 25 between April 2009 and April 2013 – successfully gave birth to the colt before being put down at Scone Equine Hospital on Saturday, one day short of her 18th birthday.

ANZ Bloodstock News understands the super sprinter had been troubled in recent weeks by laminitis stemming from an adverse reaction to treatment for a milk infection. She eventually foundered, leaving no reasonable prospect of any sustainable quality of life.

It’s understood the Snitzel colt, her ninth foal, will be reared at North Stud in the Hunter Valley, where Black Caviar had been agisting, and where her prominent part-owner Neil Werrett keeps many of his horses.

Black Caviar bore four fillies and two colts in the six years from 2014, the last two a colt and a filly by I Am Invincible, before she missed to that sire in 2019.

In 2021 she left Persian Caviar, now a yet-to-race three-year-old filly in the Moody and Katherine Coleman stable, but missed again twice that season, to Extreme Choice and I Am Invincible again.

Black Caviar produced a colt by The Autumn Sun last spring before her final cover, from his Arrowfield barnmate, Snitzel.

Moody sometimes said the same thing of training the mare humbly known around his stable as Nelly, who took not just the Australian racing community but the nation as a whole on an unforgettable ride.

At the height of Black Caviar fever, as the dark brown mare’s winning streak shot into double figures with no sign of stopping, the clamour from the Australian public for the galloping machine was near unstoppable.

Several years before Winx mania, Black Caviar was everywhere, front page and back. She was the first animal featured on the long-running ABC series Australian Story, and would later sit alongside the likes of Don Bradman, Rod Laver and Dawn Fraser in the Australian Sports Hall of Fame.

On Saturday, Moody spoke of the mare’s sweet nature - off the track at least - and how his three then-teenaged daughters could ride her bareback when she was spelling on the family farm, and “play with her like a big puppy dog”.

“She was a big, strong, boisterous, cranky girl when in work, but at home it was just ‘flick the switch’,” he told Racing.com. “She had a wonderful personality, and that attached to her brilliant racing career .. she had it all.”

Black Caviar wins her 23rd consecutive race, the Black Caviar Lightning Stakes, in, 2013Credit: Lucas Dawson/Getty Images

Alas, as so often happens, the 15-time Group 1-winning mare’s greatness on the track didn’t transfer to the breeding barn, though her best was ill-fated. 

Of her five foals to race, four were winners, but only one scored in town. The Moody-trained Invincible Caviar won four of eight, including one at Flemington, and ran fifth and seventh in two shots at Listed class, before dying of a suspected heart attack last November.

Of her imposing frame that could take the breath away of those seeing her in the flesh for the first time, the great Bart Cummings once famously said she had “the neck of a duchess and the arse of a cook”.

It was that physique which so captivated Moody when he first saw Black Caviar as Lot 520, a yearling filly bred by Rick Jamieson of Victoria’s Gilgai Farm, and sold through the at Oaklands Junction for the Inglis Premier sale of 2009.

“I knew I was in love with her. Now I had to figure out how to buy her,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Neil Werrett and his co-owners had specified an upper limit of A$100,000. He went to A$210,000 to secure her, beating rivals including Leon and Troy Corstens, who moments later asked – unsuccessfully – to buy half of her. Thankfully for Moody, Werrett trusted his judgement and forgot about the budget.

By dual Group 1 winner Bel Esprit, Black Caviar would prove the high point of what became the great female family of Scandinavia, the dual Group-winning granddaughter of a mare imported in the late 1970s by Kingston Town’s owner David Hains from the “wilderness” of Denmark, that country’s Oaks winner Love Song.

While Scandinavia threw four stakes winners, including Moody’s Group 1 victor Magnus, this filly was from her unraced second daughter Helsinge, named for a town near the coast in Denmark. Her new owners in turn named her for that area’s prime product. Continuing the aquaculture theme, she would carry silks of salmon pink - with dots resembling black caviar.

There was no greater pressure when it came to training her than her 2012 mission to Royal Ascot for the Diamond Jubilee Stakes. Again carrying injuries, her participation was not even confirmed until hours before the race. Then, with millions of Australians watching in the small hours, jockey Luke Nolen flirted with infamy by nursing her to the line, before feverishly riding again to lift her to a head victory over Moonlight Cloud.

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