Andrew Rule - Q and A - The Chosen Few

This article is a sponsored post by Allen & Unwin

Andrew Rule’s new book, The Chosen Few, is available now. Click to Buy.

Andrew, there have been several books on the champions of racing – but none quite like this. What made you want to write The Chosen Few?

Andrew Rule: The idea came from Allen & Unwin’s commissioning editor Sally Heath, who knows me and of my interest in horses and racing. Sally thought I would be able to come up with something readable with more narrative story lines than the usual sports books, which are often either heavily statistical or a list of fairly raw and untested anecdotes.

How does being an investigative journalist come in handy when writing about some of racing’s greatest mysteries?

AR: The instinct to chase leads and solve mysteries runs deep. It is amazing that once you start reading up on a subject (in this case, mostly long-dead horses) there are questions that demand to be answered or at least probed. Racing, of course, is riddled with stories of skullduggery and impropriety, real and imagined, so there were a few things to look at. And I did.

There is no shortage of scandals, myths and mysteries surrounding these champions. Was there anything you uncovered in researching this book that surprised you?

AR: The idea (whether right or wrong) that there is a powerful circumstantial case that Tulloch was nobbled in his 4YO year (as opposed to suffering a ‘mystery virus’) hit me when I realised that his symptoms were virtually identical to those in the most notorious nobbling of all — that of Big Philou before the 1969 Melbourne Cup. The more I looked into it, the stronger it seemed. But the key fact I stumbled over when talking to author Ken Linnett was that Tulloch’s former work rider and strapper Lem Bann had actually been approached by a leading bookmaker about nobbling the horse. The other good ‘crime’ angle is that Bernborough was clearly owned and/or controlled by a family of rogues for several years until the authorities forced him to be auctioned. He was, according to his trainer Harry Plant, ‘pulled up’ in the Caulfield Cup to suit bookmaking interests. Then there’s the intriguing century-old mystery of Phar Lap’s paternity ….

You’ve said that at its heart racing is about horses and people – we know who your picks are for the greatest racehorses but what about some of the greatest people in Australia’s racing history?

AR: It’s a Melbourne Cup field and a blanket finish but researching the book underlines some names and adds a few to the list for me. One such is the owner (and sometime rider) of the champion all-rounder Malua, the wealthy station owner J.O. Inglis, who rode Malua himself in several races, notably to win the 1888 Grand National Hurdle. Harry Bamber, the battler who picked the unwanted ugly duckling Phar Lap from a catalogue, is a racing tragic for the ages. Phar Lap made him famous and relatively rich but it didn’t last and poor Harry ended up broke and alone. The Phar Lap story also includes the lovable Tommy Woodcock, who almost certainly accidentally killed the horse with kindness in the form of the arsenic based Fowlers “tonic” then widely used. And the champ’s greatest jockey Jim Pike, who also died broke and alone decades afterwards. Then there are the bush rascals, the Bach family of Oakey in Queensland, who bought Bernborough and his mother for a song just as World War 2 began. These are characters who would be hard to make up.

What do you hope readers take away from The Chosen Few?

AR: Mostly, a sense that once you’ve identified the most dominant all-time champions (Carbine, Phar Lap and Tulloch and the modern pair Black Caviar and Winx) it gets hard to discriminate between star racehorses of each era. It is also fairly pointless. Who can validly compare a Makybe Diva’s three Melbourne Cups (and Cox Plate and Australian Cup) with Vain’s all-conquering run of wins up to a mile? As that complex and much-loved but not always lovable character Bart Cummings once said — don’t compare champions, just enjoy them.

Andrew Rule’s new book, The Chosen Few, is available now. Click to Buy