Andrew Rule - Chance

About Chance

If you want to bet on numbers, go to a casino. If you want theatre, go to the races. - Les Carlyon

All his life, Andrew Rule has watched racings heroes and villains, dreamers and schemers.

In Chance, he distils the daring, the desperation and danger of the track, peeling back some of racings most famous and infamous moments, its celebrations and its secrets, the grittiness behind the glitz.

There are stories of those who set the odds and those who take them, betting plunges planned more carefully than bank robberies, of tricky trainers, reckless jockeys and bold bookmakers.

Tough and sometimes tender, dark and sometimes funny, Chance transcends the industry they call the sport of kings.

To those who laid the odds and those who took them

If you want to bet on numbers, go to a casino. If you want theatre, go to the races.

Les Carlyon

The punt giveth and the punt taketh away.

Racetrack proverb

Craig Abraham/The Age

Before the fall: Floyd Podgornik cuts a dash with Carolyn Palliardi in his Gatsby days. He builds skyscrapers, bets sky high and ends it all before his stable full of young horses come good.

They say no owner of an unraced two-year-old kills himself. Floyd Podgornik shoots that theory full of holes with a fancy Italian pistol in his penthouse bathroom early in the autumn of 1990.

Floyd is a self-made tycoon and nurses his image of himself as jealously as a grievance. His idea of style runs to Porsches, Zegna suits and the most beautiful mistress in the Millionaires Club. He looks like a leading man born to play the dashing mob boss and maybe hes a bit of both, actor and wise guy.

You dont claw your way to the top of the skyscraper building racket without a little racketeering. A man like that is never going to end it all by dropping a toaster in the bath like some bank teller caught tickling the till to play the pokies.

The thing is, Floyd has a barn full of million-dollar babes on a property that cost him more than a beachfront compound in Portsea or Palm Beach. Even the horses swimming pool is tiled in Beverly Hills blue. He names it Symbol Lodge and it is: a symbol of the success of a Yugoslav kid who walked alone down the gangplank onto Australian soil in 1963 with only a cardboard suitcase, a hunger for work and a gamblers nerve.

In Sydney, he labours all day and plays cards for money at night. In Melbourne, he starts a scaffolding business, the foundation of a fortune built among the forest of cranes poking into the city skyline. But when the recession bites, Floyds yellow brick road fades to black. As the sun sets on eighties excesses, Symbol Lodge and its barns full of expensive horseflesh are more a millstone than money in the bank.

As Floyd weighs his shrinking options against the fatal promise of a Fratelli Tanfoglio handgun, barely one of his hothouse flowers has won a race. Three years earlier, before Wall Street crashed, he filleted the Sydney betting ring with a plunge on an imported horse named Knyf. That day, he produced a suitcase, not cardboard this time, to carry the bookies cash away from Randwick.

Speculation about why Floyd pulled the trigger feeds gossip about the enigmatic millionaire with the gutsy wife who helped him make a fortune and the glamorous girlfriend who helped spend it in style. There is loose talk he didnt do the deed himself but the evidence for that is up there with Elvis sightings. If he owes millions to scary people, and there is nothing to suggest thats the case, then killing him also kills any chance of getting the money. Murderers might be stupid but people who invest millions tend not to be.

In the dark hours before Floyds final dawn, fears that his horses are duds should be well down the list of his troubles. His business dramas have turned into tragedy: its just two days since his friend and fellow property player Charlie Mantello jumped from the thirteenth floor of a St Kilda Road tower.

The week after Floyd fires the shot that echoes around racing and business circles across the country, one of his Symbol Lodge horses wins. By spring, the trickle of success turns into a stream. The lush Podgornik racing colours, glossy black with gold seams, start filling placegetters stalls. The best of the bunch, Centro, wins the Caulfield Guineas and comes within a stride of taking the Victoria Derby. But the man who dreamed of all that isnt there to see it come true.

After one of the better wins, his broken-hearted son says, I hope there are bookmakers in Heaven.

Its not a bad epitaph for a gambler. But theres a punters maxim that gets closer to the heart of it, on the track and off: Money lost, nothing lost; confidence lost, everything lost.

Racing, like life itself, runs on hope. And hope is a hostage to chance.

*

Its the spring of 2018. Ive never heard of the black filly with the forgettable name before I get a call late in Cup week. The caller wants me to watch her trial at Cranbourne.

The man on the phone has seen thousands of gallopers in his time. Ridden them, fed them, bet on them. It all started for him before he rode at his first professional race meeting when he was twelve, standing in for a missing jockey because the stewards knew he could ride before he could write. He beat half the field home in a borrowed skullcap and breeches.

He is apprenticed at fourteen. At sixteen, he is winning country cups against senior riders. At eighteen, he is too heavy for race riding. By then, he has a Ford Customline V8 that wont go past a petrol pump, and a taste for the punt that wont let him past the betting ring. Beer and cigarettes he can give up any time and often does but the punt runs deeper and wider.

Now, a lifetime has slid by and still he loves the horses and never misses the chance to hitch his luck to the one he knows is out there, waiting. He doesnt get to the track much. He knows one of the black fillys many owners well but cant be there and wants a neutral report.

You dont have to own an unraced horse to be sucked into the fantasy of untapped potential. A young galloper is as seductive as animals get, a beautiful lottery ticket for dreamers and schemers. This one is a three-year-old and has had one start, running greenly but showing speed. She is what the Registrar of racehorses records as brown. To the casual eye, she is black with no white markings, and moves across turf like a shadow. Racings not a beauty parade but if it were, shed go top three anywhere this side of Kentucky.

When the machine bangs open, she flows out in a way to make an owners heart sing. She sweeps past the also-rans to hit the front before the turn and keeps putting distance on them. Wins by five lengths, cruising. Makes it look easy.

Winning a trial against other green fillies doesnt mean much. Winx was never given enough rein to win a jump-out in her life, whereas plenty of undistinguished gallopers do, especially if theres a chance of puffing their price to interstate or Hong Kong buyers. But on this morning at Cranbourne, there are fourteen 800-metre trials. The black filly doesnt just win hers by panels, she runs the fastest time of the day, a fraction better than the track record. That