A Great Win All Round for the Battlers: Knight's Choice

[Chief Stipe]

Good Knight & Good Luck

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by Jessica Owers

Melbourne Cup winner Knight’s Choice was a Magic Millions graduate before he dazzled the world in November. He was a small yearling but, as Jessica Owers found out from his breeder, size wasn’t everything.

Knight’s Choice was only ordinary, if traffic was to be believed at the 2021 Gold Coast Yearling Sale.

“You know how it goes,” says the horse’s breeder, 76-year-old Norm Bazeley. “The experts come out and they think he’s a bit small, the kind of stuff we’ve all heard before. Once upon a time I’d flare up, but now I just take it on the chin. Oh well, I say, just give it time, and that’s what happened.”

On November 5, Knight’s Choice won the Melbourne Cup in an argument with the Japanese raider Warp Speed. There was a nose in it, a few inches separating the local from the import.

The winner was just the fourth Australian-bred horse this century to prevail in the ‘race that stops a nation’, and the first by an Australian-bred sire since Rogan Josh in 1999. He is the fourth Melbourne Cup-winning graduate for Magic Millions, hot on the heels of Let's Elope in 1991, Subzero in 1992 and Shocking in 2009.

“It’s a story for the battlers,” Bazeley says, and he would know. He’s one of them.

Three hours north of Scone, in the township of Walcha, he has a couple of broodmares on a property called Elswick Park. Two hundred years ago, this was bushranger country. The grass is thick and good on basalt plains over 1000 metres above sea level, and the district has its racing history. The 1905 Melbourne Cup winner, Blue Spec, was bred locally by Augustus Hooke, and renowned breeder Jill Nivison lives here too.

 

Norm Bazeley, Breeder Knight’s Choice

“It’s good for horses,” Bazeley says. “People go on to me about Scone, but up here it’s hilly basalt country with naturally good pasture. The only issue is that our winter tends to last four to five weeks longer, so the mares are cycling a bit later.”

Walcha is sat along Thunderbolts Way, a remote stretch of road from Gloucester in the south to Uralla in the north. Few people realise it is the fastest route between Sydney and Brisbane because its remoteness, so useful to the scallywag for whom it was named, puts travellers off; they prefer the populated route through Tamworth, Scone and Singleton.

 

Lot 1001, Extreme Choice-Midnight Pearl, (Knight’s Choice), 2021 Magic Millions, with John Donnelly

“I am born and bred Walcha,” Bazeley says. “If you see the big house at the end of town there (Langford House, circa 1905) and look down the road a bit, that’s where you’ll find us.”

Bazeley hasn’t spent his whole life in Walcha. As a younger man he worked in civil construction on projects like the Pindari and Toonumbar dams, and later in Brisbane. He lost his first wife to a sudden cerebral haemorrhage when she was 45, and these days he is married to Diane. They bought Elswick Park in 2000.

 

Lot 1001, Extreme Choice-Midnight Pearl, (Knight’s Choice), 2021 Magic Millions, with John Donnelly

“It didn’t have a lot on it,” Bazeley says. “It had a bit of infrastructure, some sheds and things, but we added to it.” In the end, the most important addition was the broodmare Midnight Pearl, dam of Melbourne Cup winner Knight’s Choice.

“It’s like a dream,” Bazely says. “It still is and I’m afraid I’ll wake up”

“I got her at a sale for $1000 (in 2013). I knew I’d got a bargain. She was by More Than Ready and I had this idea about going to Not A Single Doubt. So I tried to do that, but it didn’t work out and we ended up going to Extreme Choice, who was still a bit new at Newgate.”

Time may have improved the story, but without a stakes winner in any of her immediate pedigree, Midnight Pearl was knocked back for Not A Single Doubt. At nearby Newgate, his son, Extreme Choice, was a second-season sire in 2018 and Bazeley got in for $22,000. Today, Extreme Choice stands for over 10 times that sum.

“We laugh about it now,” he says. “I understand why they refused the booking; she wasn’t good enough. We all have fun with it now and she’s gone back to Arrowfield since. She’s got a lovely filly at foot by The Autumn Sun.”

Knight’s Choice was foaled at Elswick Park on September 20, 2019, when Midnight Pearl was 14.

In Bazeley’s opinion it was a good bloodline, but it wasn’t a Melbourne Cup bloodline.

“I mainly thought that if Knight’s Choice eventually won a good sprint race, or a middle-distance race, that would be about where he was supposed to be.”

In 2021, Bazeley took three yearlings to the Magic Millions catalogue in January. Knight’s Choice, as Lot 1001, was neat and tidy and small. With the fall of the gavel, he sold for $85,000 to the Queensland training pair of Sheila Laxon and John Symons, and, as so often occurs in horse racing, it proved one of bloodstock’s greatest bargains.

“After the Cup, one of the first guys to ring me was Les Kelly, who had been the underbidder at $80,000,” Bazeley says. “He couldn’t believe it. But I just had that feeling with that horse that he was always going to end up with Sheila and John.”

The Knight’s Choice story has been one of swings and roundabouts.

Both Laxon and Symons knew the pedigree long before the 2021 Magic Millions catalogue; they had trained Midnight Pearl from 2010 to her purchase by Bazeley on the cheap. They had also trained the mare’s half-brother, Denoninator. Meanwhile, Richard and Kay Waldron, who had bred Midnight Pearl and who had been distressed to sell her for next to nothing in 2013, are now two of the three owners in Knight’s Choice (alongside Cameron Bain).

 

Knight's Choice, the morning after winning the 2024 G1 Melbourne Cup

Sheila Laxon had had big opinions of Denoninator, a horse she had thought could have reckoned with a Melbourne Cup. “So when John saw Knight’s Choice in the Magic Millions catalogue, he really liked what he saw and decided to buy him,” Laxon says, but Symons remembers there wasn’t much of a horse to buy.

“He was only little, but I know the sire was little,” Symons says. “Still, he had all the attributes that I really look for. He was a good walker and had a really big jowl for a little horse. He just appealed to me, and of course we knew the family well.

When Richard and Kay sold that mare, Midnight Pearl, for just $1000, they were devastated, and I mean really devastated, to get that money for her. But I told them not to worry, that we could go and get the best one out of her and race it, so that’s how it all came about.”

Knight’s Choice was above average from the beginning. Just four starts in he posted a fourrace winning streak through Queensland’s 2023 winter carnival. It led to a $2.3 million offer from Hong Kong, which was rejected amid a circus of speculation and public opinion. A year later the horse is a millionaire Melbourne Cup winner, and Norm Bazeley says it is no accident.

“John and Sheila are old-time horse people. They’ve trained that horse to perfection, and I believe they’ve made a stayer out of that bloodline. They educated the horse in a proper manner and I hold my hat up to them.”

Laxon and Symons put their polish on Knight’s Choice at Macedon Lodge, which Laxon had also done in 2001 when sending Ethereal out to win the Melbourne Cup. She might be the only undefeated Cup-winning trainer in history.

“It was a pipeline dream for her to win a second one, and she did it and that is amazing,” Bazeley says. “You’ve got to give it to her. She’s had two horses in the Melbourne Cup and she’s won both of them. I was so happy when they got that little colt from me because they were small-time trainers and they’ve come out with this result. It’s a credit to them.”

Bazeley watched the race from his living room in Walcha, Diane at bridge club in town. For a moment after Knight’s Choice poked past the post, Bazeley was pale and grave awaiting the photo finish before the greatest thrill he has known. Within the hour, friend John Donnelly was at his door, three years ago just a local kid who led Knight’s Choice around the sale ring at Magic Millions.

“It’s like a dream,” Bazeley says. “It still is and I’m afraid I’ll wake up”, except that the journalists kept calling and the stallion farms kept asking. Midnight Pearl, his 19-year-old broodmare, was an overnight star, no book too good for her now. A week after the Melbourne Cup she went to Hitotsu.

“You can see now how it all came together,” Bazeley says. “The whole story is a close-knit, dedicated group of people, their hearts all in the right place. None of them were looking for glory but they’ve got it. It’s just a wonderful Australian story.”

[Huey]

Battlers ... really?

[Chief Stipe]

2 hours ago, Huey said:

Battlers ... really?

You obviously didn't read past the headlines or I'm confused about your definition of "battlers"!