Little whipping needed for Black Caviar to win

Nation should be talking about mighty mare

• BY:PATRICK SMITH 
• From:The Australian 
• February 20, 2012 12:00AM

WHEN Black Caviar is in a fight it is like no other. Jockey Luke Nolen does not slash the whip into her rump, sending volts of fear through the mare’s body.

Once, twice, as many times as the cruel rules allow.

There is no eye-balling of her opposition as they bob noggins in the final metres before the finishing post, stretching their necks out, flattening their heads.

Black Caviar doesn’t fight fair.

She runs a 200m slab of a 1000m race in 9.98sec. It is cheating by excellence.

Hay List is a mighty horse. There is not a sprinter in Australia, probably the world, that he could not beat. Except Black Caviar. And he can’t get near her.

Not when she dissects a 1000m race like the Lightning Stakes at speeds that might make a test pilot nervous.

On Saturday, on her way to a 19th win from 19 starts, she ran from the 600m mark to the 400m in 9.98sec.

For a sense of that speed think Usain Bolt.

He would have covered 100m in the same time. The fastest human we have ever seen is back at the 500m mark.

Black Caviar is different to all the other horses which Australians have embraced.

She’s not Bonecrusher the brawler. Or Northerly, the West Australian gelding, who threw other horses out of the way to get to the line. He won a Caulfield Cup and a Cox Plate.

Nor is she like Makybe Diva, who made Phar Lap look like a sook, winning the Melbourne Cup not once but three times in a row.

Black Caviar is entrancing because she shows none of the qualities that made those horses both loved and great.

She is not full of guts and a streetfighter’s grime.

The odds never appear stacked against her. Nothing is impossible. Black Caviar wins without appearing to try.

Black Caviar breezes. When she is cantering, when she is galloping, when she is strained like never before. She breezes. She is like a limo in the fast lane. Geez, how good is that.

Apparently, Black Caviar was under stress and strain she had never experienced before when she stretched out to beat off Hay List at Flemington on Saturday. Both jockeys tell us that. Glyn Schofield on Hay List: “She (Black Caviar) was gone. She was gone.” Luke Nolen on the mare: “(Hay List) has given me the biggest scare of my life.”

That wasn’t perceptible watching. Hay List was closer than other horses get to the mare but Black Caviar hardly lost her dignity in the stoush if that is what it was.

She won by more than a length in 55.53sec, a slither of time behind Special’s race record of 55.5s.

Yesterday morning, timing specialists had her timed under Special’s mark.

Black Caviar could now race in Dubai and collect her record 20th win on the dirt in the desert or front up again on Saturday at Caulfield in the Futurity Stakes.

What is worrying for the racing industry is the inability of Black Caviar to be noticed and followed by a wider audience than the one that already is stuck fast to racing.

At Caulfield the week before, entry to the course was free when Black Caviar went after her 18th win in the C F Orr Stakes.

The crowd was fewer than 21,000.

At Flemington on Saturday, it was 22,800.

That’s double the crowd that attended the Lightning Stakes last year but it remains a telling indication that Black Caviar continues to be a racing story and nothing broader. In the spring, when the Melbourne Cup becomes the story of the day front and back of newspapers, Derby Day has drawn more than 120,000, so too Cup day.

Two days later more than 110,000 have gone to Flemington on Oaks Day and two days later is Emirates Stakes Day.

Last year, Black Caviar ran in the Patinack Farm Stakes on that last day of the carnival – won her 16th consecutive race – and drew a record crowd of 85,112.

But it bettered the previous mark by just 1000 people.

On all these figures Black Caviar remains a story held tight within the racing community.

The racing people gush about this extraordinary mare but it is a self-contained prattle and praise.

The magnificence of Black Caviar should be a story for a nation to talk about.

She wins without being whipped, she wins without seeming to breathe deeply, she turns even a mighty galloper like Hay List into a tried-hard.

Her trainer, owners and jockey are as accessible as could be expected with a horse of such value.

But so badly has the racing industry lost touch with the greater community, so damaging is the lack of any entrepreneurial skills within the business, so poorly have administrations managed a changing society and media that racing ends up just talking to itself.

It is the first sign of irrelevancy.