Remembering Vain

Cover image, the late Vain and Pat Hyland depicted by artist Michael Jeffery courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

In the early parts of Black Caviar’s career, around the time she won her first G1 Lightning S., there were rumblings around the turf that she was hardly better than Vain. But as she clattered onwards through her flawless, 25-straight career, that opinion seemed to fizzle out, and Vain was left in her wake, demoted as Australia’s greatest sprinter.

But the picture is a little bit more complicated.

Vain, the coppery-coloured son of the French stallion Wilkes (Fr), a Golden Slipper-winning star of the 1960/70s in Australia and a horse devoted to peppermint, was a weight-carrying wonder. He lugged huge loads over dazzling speeds, defying the weight-for-age and handicap scales time and again.

Trained by Jim Moloney, he treated the stopwatch with derision, won 12 of 14 starts, was second twice and toppled Tulloch (NZ) as the greatest money-spinner of the era.

“He could be the fastest horse I’ve ever seen,” said Tommy Smith, and Bart Cummings wasn’t short of a word either.

“I don’t think I have ever known or seen a 3-year-old that could make top-class horses look as mediocre as he does,” Cummings said.

Either way, the horse was the greatest sprinter of his generation, arguably ever in the eyes of a few, and it’s hard to imagine it was just the beginning of him. In the middle of the Bletchingly and Sir Tristram (Ire) era, when these two horses bossed the stallion table, Vain was Australia’s Champion Sire in the season 1983/84.

Earning that name

Around that time, fresh-faced accountant Derek Field began working at Widden Stud, and he’s still there.

“I got to Widden in 1982 with a background in accounting,” he said. “At that time, Vain was a serious stallion. If you look at the years that Sir Dapper and Inspired won their Golden Slippers, and they won in consecutive years, they were both by Vain.”

Sir Dapper won the Slipper in 1983, and Inspired in 1984. By then, Vain had been at stud for more than a decade.

He covered his first book of mares in 1970 at a never-before-seen debut fee of $2500, and his book stood at 45. From that crop came 31 foals that won 19 races, and they included the stakes winners Kenmark, who won the Caulfield Guineas and The Goodwood H., Vain Prince and Honoured.

In that first season, Vain was pipped by Kaoru Star for the overall Sires’ title, but he won the First Season Sires’ Premiership by winners (10) and wins (19), and these figures aren’t too different from today. This season, Capitalist is likely to win the title with 18 winners and 23 individual wins.

“He was a Champion racehorse of his year by a long way, and he was very popular when he went to stud,” Field said. “In those days, a stallion book of 50 was a large number, and a busy stallion was doing two covers a day.”

Vain was one of those busy stallions, and the stark facts of his numbers are extraordinary.

From books of under 50 and, later in his career, under 40, the horse produced 45 stakes winners for 101 stakes races.

“You’ve got to remember there were no walk-ons in those days,” Field said. “All the mares resided at the farm, and they’d be covered and then sent home to their owners. That was the case even if the owner’s farm was nearby, and walk-ons didn’t really come into play until the late 80s or early 90s.”

The famous Valley

Anyone that has been to Widden Stud will appreciate its spectacular geography.

The valley dips and rises below the surrounding escarpments and, back in the day, the long road to the front gates was an adventure in itself. In 1912, turf journalist ‘Milroy’ wrote about it.

“Widden is not a very terrible place to reach when you are used to it,” he said. “A gentleman connected with the bloodstock business could not understand, or believe, that owners would send valuable mares to such a place for a stallion’s services.”

But they did. Milroy wrote of the remote hills and 45-mile track from Rylstone, leaping out of a sulky to prevent death and disaster along the old road. He said men would stand up for days after riding it.

However, he also spoke of the jewels contained in this rich pocket of country and, since 1867, when the first Thompson moved in, it’s been priceless horse country.

“I can remember in the Vain years, we had plenty of breeders from Victoria sending mares to him,” Field said. “Vain was owned by the Johnson family, the three brothers that raced the horse, and when I first started at Widden, one of the brothers, Fred, was still alive and he was the fellow I was dealing with on behalf of the family.”

The Johnsons sent plenty of their own mares to Vain, which wasn’t a small trip by road.

“People would send mares from a long distance to go to the stallion of their choice, and transport conditions were very different then, roads too,” Field said.

In the office, the paperwork was vastly different too. Field recalls a one-page service agreement that was posted to breeders setting out the terms of the service fee.

“This was pre fax machines and pre email,” he said. “But you didn’t have the volume that you do today with stallions covering 160 or 200 mares. We were covering 40 mares to a leading stallion, and Vain was one of those, along with Bletchingly and Marscay.”

Field said that era, when these horses were joined by the likes of Lunchtime (GB) and Salieri (USA), was one of the greatest in Widden history. He wonders if it was bettered only by the 1920s, when Champion sires Valais (GB) and his son Heroic stood on the property.

The brothers three

The brothers George, Fred and Walter Johnson were the owners of Vain throughout his life.

The horse was foaled at Stockwell Stud in Victoria in 1966, and was a son of the glamorous French import Wilkes, who was brought to Australia for £5000 in 1956. He stood at Newhaven Park.

Wilkes was a long, rich chestnut and, from two seasons in the mid-1960s, he poached Champion Sire honours from the mighty Star Kingdom (Ire).

Vain’s dam was Elated (Orgoglio {GB}), who won 10 races in a stakes-placed career in Victoria for the Johnson brothers. Vain was her second foal, and it’s remarkable that he survived at all. Elated was a tricky breeder. Only one other of her foals made it to the track, a full brother to Vain called Laudate, and thereafter she had two sets of twins that didn’t survive, and nearly a decade of missed and slipped covers.

Vain, however, ranks her as a significant broodmare, because his racing career was as good as it gets.

The horse won six of seven starts as a 2-year-old, including the Principal races the Champagne S., Maribyrnong Plate and Golden Slipper. With the latter victory, he became the second-highest juvenile stakes winner in Australian history to that date (only Storm Queen, by Coronation Boy {Ire} was ahead of him, but that record later toppled with his victory in the AJC Sires’ Produce S.).

Watch: Vain win the 1969 Golden Slipper

Vain’s Golden Slipper left 40,000 Rosehill racegoers speechless in 1969. Carrying Pat Hyland, he put away the first 600 metres in 33.9s, and was 2l clear of the field with only 50 yards travelled.

“It is difficult to find sufficient superlatives to describe the way this beautifully proportioned Wilkes colt ran some of Australia’s best youngsters off their feet,” wrote John Hourigan, a turf journalist for the morning papers.

As a 3-year-old, the caravan rolled on.

Vain won six of seven races again, including the Caulfield Guineas against the later Cox Plate winner, Daryl’s Joy (NZ), while his ‘remorseless, rocket-like’ acceleration earned him a 12l victory against older horses in the Craven ‘A’ S. at Flemington.

Lumping 5lbs (2.2kgs) over weight-for-age, on a straight six classified as ‘slow’, Vain clocked 1.09s. There were few horses in the world that would have lived with him that day, and it was the first of three victories across the four days of the 1970 Melbourne Cup carnival.

Thereafter, Vain was retired with inflammation in his near-foreleg, and the Johnson family fielded big dollars for the horse from overseas. They settled on Widden Stud in the spring of 1970 as the ideal place for his next career.

Family trees

In Melbourne, Tim Johnson is the grandson of Walter Johnson, one of the three brothers in Vain. Johnson is a lawyer these days, but he also had Ealing Park at one time, which stood Kingston Rule (USA) and Good Journey (USA).

He is the father of rising bloodstock agent Will Johnson, and the family remains attached to its history with Vain. Johnson was a young boy during the horse’s racing days.

“Vain was the first colt that my grandad didn’t geld,” Johnson said. “He basically bred racehorses, and that was the way back then. Most of the stallions that stood successfully in Australia at that time weren’t colonial horses, so the thought process from my grandad’s point of view was probably along those lines.”

Johnson doesn’t know what prompted Walter to leave Vain intact, but the horse was left a colt and he headed to Mordialloc trainer Jim Moloney.

“Walter’s private trainer was a bloke called Dave Walsh, and he said he was too old to train a colt, so they had to find a new trainer,” Johnson said. “Jim Moloney got the job because he had a stable jockey, and that was Pat Hyland.”

The Johnson family has scrapbooks and mementos from Vain’s career. It donated the Golden Slipper trophy to the Australian Racing Museum a number of years ago, and Johnson recalls a significant family anecdote.

“My grandfather died in Sydney in 1971, on the night he returned from Widden Stud having visited Vain in his paddock for the first time,” he said. “Walter had major heart surgery some 18 months before, and Vain had kept him alive, so when he saw the horse, he was happy then and he died in his sleep that night.”

A gentleman

Vain passed away on Christmas Day in 1991, a coy old horse of 25-years-old. To the end, he had the same good manners and disposition that he had always had, right back to his days on the track.

With the stable name ‘Joe’, he was described as sensible and quiet by his trainer Jim Moloney, with no special requirements outside of lucerne, oats, soya beans and molasses.

“He’s a mad eater,” Moloney said. “He might chew the bandages on his legs after a meal, but that’s more mischievousness than hunger.”

However, Vain was an intelligent stallion.

Throughout the 1980s, he was tended at Widden by resident vet Mark Wylie, who was in the early throes of a career in veterinarian science. Wylie said that he couldn’t get near the horse if he was wearing his traditional vet’s outfit.

“In those days, our PPE gear was King Gee overalls,” Wylie said. “And they were white, just so we could show off all the blood and faecal stuff. I realised very quickly that if I walked anywhere near Vain with those overalls, he would burr up immediately and I was in trouble.”

Wylie had a tiny window in ‘civvies’ to treat Vain, and he said there were times that the horse had him in a potentially dangerous corner. But not once did Vain make good on his threats, and Wylie said he was one of the most delightful stallions he has ever looked after.

“He was an absolute gentleman, just a lovely horse,” he said. “He was this big, robust, chestnut stallion with a wonderful, kind and warm personality. He was a highly intelligent horse, but he just did not like vets.”

Vain was a high-achiever in his long life, and it’s a credit to him that he is still mentioned in the same breath as Australia’s greatest sprinters. As a sire, he was an excellent example, but his line survives more through the females than the males.

As an example, the broodmare Market Maid (Marscay) went to him in his second-to-last crop in 1990, producing the filly Peach. In 2006, Peach visited Lonhro, and the result of that pairing was no less than Denman.