From premierships to pedigrees – Noel Carter chases racing’s ultimate prize in Winterbottom

In the realm of sporting endeavours, it took Noel Carter a nanosecond to achieve celebrity status as a member of Richmond’s 1973 VFL grand final-winning team.

As an 18-year-old from Gunns Plains in northwest Tasmania, Carter was thrust onto one of the most auspicious stages in Australian sport.

Surrounded by men who were well on their way to becoming household and revered names such as Kevin Sheedy and Kevin Bartlett, Carter played his role.

It was just Carter’s fifth VFL game. He kicked a goal in Richmond’s 30-point win over Carlton in front of an MCG crowd of almost 117,000.

There will be nowhere near that many people at Ascot on Saturday, but as a racehorse owner, the moment for Carter will be a significant one.

Unlike his instant fame as a footballer in Victoria that morphed into more premiership success with South Fremantle in the WAFL, reaching the summit in thoroughbred racing is a continuing journey.

There have been a few decent horses along the way. Red Can Man has been the best of them as the winner of nine races and almost $1.6 million and is now living a richly deserved life in retirement.

Red Can Man ran in five Winterbottoms, the past two won by Overpass, a star of trainer Bjorn Baker’s thriving Sydney stable who is the favourite to win Perth’s best sprint for a third time.

In the hobby world of Carter’s breeding and racing interests, the baton has now been passed to Rope Them In to end his wait for a Group 1 victory.

Carter, along with family members and some friends, bred Rope Them In, a sprinter that is blessed with enough talent to ensure the Winterbottom Stakes might not be the two-horse race between Overpass and Jokers Grin that it seems on paper.

Off a $5000 service fee for Western Australia’s leading sire Playing God, Rope Them In is rated among the best of the new kids on the Perth sprinting scene after signalling his arrival in the top bracket 12 months ago.

Playing God now stands for almost $50,000 and Rope Them In has already earned more than $1.2 million.

“It’s being in the right place at the right time. That’s what it is called,” Carter told The Straight.

Carter has made a habit of that. In an era when most footballers were moving from west to east to play in the VFL, Carter did the opposite.

In 1978, he landed at South Fremantle. It was supposed to be for one year.

Over seven seasons, he played 155 games and kicked 317 goals, captaining the Bulldogs for four years and guiding the club to the 1980 premiership. 

But even at the height of his football career, racing was never far from Carter’s mind. He owned a small shares in racehorses during his playing days but there wasn’t a lot of time or money for serious investment.

“I’ve always had an interest and passion in racing. But when you’ve got families and kids to bring up and mortgages to pay they are your priorities,” he said.

“Once I got through a lot of that, I was able to get a little bit more involved … once that I had a bit of something to spend.”

Carter ran and owned a successful general insurance firm that included a bloodstock division which gave him a footprint in the WA racing industry.

Now 70, he is semi-retired having sold his business but he is a member of the Federation of Bloodstock Agents Australia, trading as Commercial Bloodstock Services.

It’s a name that often appears as a vendor and buyer at Magic Millions’ Perth Yearling Sale, the auction where Rope Them In made $60,000 in 2022 and from where Red Can Man was sourced for $50,000 four years earlier.

While football will always remain part of his identity as a Richmond and South Fremantle life member, a Tasmania Hall of Fame inductee and forward who represented his home state seven times and WA twice, it will take a backseat at Ascot, even if the sport’s vernacular remains present.

“The coach tells me Rope Them In is doing all the right things and working well,” he says of the five-year-old’s trainer Steve Wolfe.

“So, I’ll go there with a little bit of hope, but wishing for a bit of luck as well. 

“You want the good one, not the bad one, because everyone has luck. 

“There’s a lot of people around that tell you the horse can’t do this and he can’t do that. But my gut’s telling me we’re going to be very competitive.”