Celebrations and setbacks – Chris Munce on racing’s fickle fortunes

Resilience and instinct have served Chris Munce well both as a champion jockey and rapidly ascending trainer.

He’s needed a little of both this week after being confronted by a setback not shattering in the overall, at times dramatic, story of his two careers but rotten luck just the same.

Cool Archie just wasn’t himself after pulling up from a gallop on Tuesday. Last season’s champion Queensland two-year-old was to have resumed in the Gold Edition Plate at Eagle Farm on Saturday en route to the Magic Millions Three-Year-Old Guineas at the Gold Coast in January.

Cool Archie was to be the pin-up horse for the Millions meeting, one close to the heart of Munce, a bush-born Queenslander who burst from the Sunshine state in the mid-1990s hot on the heels of Mick Dittman and whose glittering riding record included three victories in the Magic Millions Classic.

As a trainer, Munce has been the mouse that roared and an on-going feel-good story leading into the glitz of the Gold Coast’s feature carnival..

Alas, his brilliant Sires and Atkins winner from last winter is out of the summer. There is no obvious injury to Cool Archie, just a gut feel from Munce that something wasn’t right.

Vet tests are expected to yield results in coming says “but they might come back with nothing specific.”

“He never really recovered properly after the gallop. He’s normally very clean and recovers quickly but his recovery was slow,” he tells The Straight.

“I came around later in the morning when no-one was around and I just didn’t like the look of him. I’ve had him since he was a yearling and when you’ve worked so closely with a horse you can see things that others wouldn’t see sometimes.”

Just as Bjorn Baker has muscled into the top tier of trainers in Sydney with a relatively small team of horses, Munce and his son Corey as training partners, and Munce, Corey and daughter Caitlin as a thriving family business, have risen through the increasingly strong Brisbane ranks against the odds, and off the canvas.

Munce’s training career hit a costly crossroad in 2020 when stewards inspected his Eagle Farm stables and charged him with race-day treatment. Munce would plead guilty to one charge and was initially outed for three months before it was eventually reduced to a fine but an on-going investigation relying on an alleged “25 CCTV packets of alleged race day treatment” dragged on for three years, costing both Munce and Queensland racing hundreds of thousands of dollars as Munce fought to clear his name.

When Queensland’s integrity body dropped the charges in November 2023, a relieved Munce said it had been “like watching a bad movie twice.”

Munce had been cleared but was left to pick up the pieces. He not only did that, in part because of the support of a tightknit family, but became stronger. He never doubted he would rise again.

“We had the systems in place, we had the farm. It dragged on way too long and we knew we didn’t have a case to answer but I never thought it would put an end to it (career),” he said.

Munce’s children Corey and Caitlin are 30 and 28 respectively and were too young to witness their father’s spectacular career in the saddle, one that yielded 35 Group One wins, multiple victories on the Gold Coast in January and the rare feat of claiming racing’s four pillars of the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups, Cox Plate and Golden Slipper.

“Corey has said once or twice in interviews that he wishes he was old enough to appreciate his old man’s riding career and that really does mean a lot to me,” Munce said.

“Occasionally they’ll ask me about a race and maybe we’ll drag out a replay but I don’t force it down their throats or anything.”

As adults, Corey and Caitlin have become integral to the success of the greatest strike rate stable in metro Queensland.

Corey, a former pilot, joined his father in partnership in August last year. Caitlin is one of two key staff at Munce’s Gold Coast satellite stable.

As a training duo – and family trio – the Munce’s have become a boutique force in Queensland racing.

Twelve-time premier trainer Tony Gollan remains the immovable object with 67 metropolitan winners this season but Chris and Corey Munce are a clear second with 30 wins at a strike rate of 24 per cent.

Big names have entered the Queensland ranks but the satellite stables of Annabel and Rob Archibald, Ciaron Maher, Chris Waller and Michael Freedman trail Team Munce.

“We set a very good foundation before that drama with the stewards and Corey has been there along the way. He was flying planes but then Covid hit and he was out of a job. He started working with me and really enjoyed it,” Munce said.

“I had suggested to him that maybe he should get some experience at a bigger stable in Melbourne or Sydney but he said “look Dad, I love it up here and I like working with you.”

“I’m no Aidan O’Brien or Chris Waller but I like to think I’m a good horseman, do the right thing by the animal, and I’ve tried to do my best by Corey.

“Caitlin has really stepped up in the last 12 months too. She’s doing a terrific job down at the Gold Coast stable. Having your two children working with you, sharing the success, it’s extremely rewarding.”

Had the Munce children been old enough, they’d have witnessed the old man as a star of one of racing’s great jockey eras.

It was both recent and distant. Munce fondly recalls riding for legends like Jack Denham and Brian Mayfield-Smith, trainers unfamiliar to the mostly young fans who have filled racecourses around the country this spring.

His was an era of male dominance and heavy hitters; Dittman, Hall, Dye, Oliver, Cassidy.

The female jockey wave hadn’t hit, although Munce saw it coming as he witnessed boys getting too big and girls dominating numbers at pony clubs.

“In Melbourne and Sydney you had 10 jockeys who would have been champions anywhere in the world but it was a different world back then,” Munce said. “You look at J Mac (James McDonald), a very, very good rider who rides all over the world, all the time. For us, it was about winning premierships, then Shane (Dye) started going interstate to chase Group Ones interstate. Back then, going interstate was as far as we went.”

It was an era when jockeys were not constrained by the clutter of information and expectation Munce says has played negatively against the jockeys of today.

“I feel a bit sorry for the young riders today. There is so much social media scrutiny, so much information – everyone is always watching – that you can restrict naturally good riders,” Munce said.

“It’s like restricting a talented footballer. If they’re a natural talent, let them do their job. With all the speed maps – even the stewards have them – it all becomes a bit confusing.”

Munce and his former contemporaries chuckle at the argy bargy of rivalries where there was always a beer after the last but zero quarter given on-track. He remembers upsetting Darren Beadman and Lonhro aboard Defier in a Warwick Stakes only for “Daz to get me back big time” at their next clash. “You’ll have to ask him about that,” Munce said with a chuckle.

Munce enjoyed great success with Gai Waterhouse and while he says Waterhouse had a template – go forward, own the race – there was room for jockey instinct.

“Gai let me do my job my way,” he said. “I knew what we wanted and we sort of had an affinity. We never had one blue. She trusted me to execute.”

Munce says one of his most satisfying wins was aboard Dance Hero, one of his three MM winners, in the 2005 Salinger Stakes at Flemington. It was the day he defied Waterhouse’s orders and came up trumps.

“It’s a day I’ll never forget. I’d won the Mackinnon for Gai earlier in the day on Desert War. There was a raging bias to the inside fence and Gai said “you must find the rail” and I thought “geez, not gonna be easy given we’ve drawn the very outside,” he said.

“A few of us were chatting behind the gates, trying to work out who was going to go where, and I basically said “I’ve got no idea, I’m just going to ride how I find him.”

“I always rode best that way. I rode on feel and instinct. Dance Hero hadn’t won for something like 18 months. He landed on his Sydney leg and we had no choice but to come down the outside rail. Against the odds and against the pattern, he was able to win.”

Munce’s career came to a controversial end in 2007 when during a stint in Hong Kong, he was charged with providing tips and was imprisoned for two years. Not surprisingly, it is a chapter of his life he neither reflects upon or wishes to revisit.

It is a dim memory for him and barely remembered by racing fans who have enjoyed the impact of trainers like 56-year-old Munce in a training world that offers little opportunity for “the little guys.”

“You get these big conglomerates, Maher, Waller, and sometimes you wonder if racing is the better for it,” he said.

“They are phenomenal in what they’ve done but you wonder “where have the characters gone? “Where are the good stories?”

Cool Archie bringing down the house at the Gold Coast next month would have been one of those good stories.

Racing has a habit of wrecking such scenarios but it also spins quickly.

A year ago, Cool Archie was a nobody two-year-old who ran eighth in the Magic Millions Classic as a $51 shot. By winter, he’d grown wings.

Zip Lock scored impressively on debut at Doomben last month for Team Munce and is a $15 chance in betting for the Classic. He is a fair way down the ballot but another victory, or even a placing, should secure him a spot.

The Magic Millions is arguably the centrepiece of Chris Munce’s story; where it began, where it continues.

He won it as a 19-year-old for his master Eric Kirwin aboard Sunblazer in 1989 and twice for his greatest ally, Gai Waterhouse, with Excellerator (2001) and his all-time favourite Dance Hero (2004).

The ill-timed loss of Cool Archie this summer has been shattering but it will take more than that to kick Munce out of the Millions.

“We’ll have a few there. It’s a race meeting that has meant a lot to me since I was a kid. Lots of great memories,” he said.