Sad day as old stars farewelled
Inseparable in their retired life - and also now in death - two star former racehorses lie buried next to each other under the picturesque dam banks at their long-time Myalup home.
With Elite Belle crowned the latest Railway Stakes champion at Ascot last Saturday, a tale both heartwarming and heartbreaking has emerged about the 1998 winner of the State's richest annual race.
Veteran horseman Michael Campbell revealed to _The West Australian _his agonising decision last year to put down his bold galloper Machine Gun Tom on the same day as one of his other stable stars, 1993 Bunbury Stakes winner Craft Memory.
The pair had been best mates and barely apart for a dozen years after "Tom" was retired in 2001. They alternated scenery from Myalup's beautiful bush to their riverside paradise at Alexander Bridge.
When they were apart, they pined for each other. And as the physical condition of 25-year-old Craft Memory deteriorated to the point where any quality of life had vanished, Campbell decided to let his 21-year-old paddock partner go with him.
"You feel shallow and gutted, like you've lost part of your family … they were my life," Campbell said as he stood by their unmarked graves of the pair who between them won 29 races and almost $700,000 in prizemoney.
"It was shattering. It really was because it was 25 years you were with them, from the time they were born. But I'm a lucky bastard, I reckon, because a lot of people don't get that chance."
Campbell could barely believe 16 years had passed since Tom won the Railway. It had been an "extra special" victory because the horse's father, Corporate Raider, had been the valuable sire at Campbell's Bellbridge Park stud and his mother, Elmhurst, had been owned by Campbell's now late best mate, Tom Forrest.
"I remember the day that we mated her (Elmhurst) because it was an exceptional mating," he said. "I said, 'That mare is in foal' on the spot and that was Tom."
Campbell said Tom had always had significant feet problems, so he had to follow an unorthodox training program, which included plenty of swimming and cantering without a saddle up hills. But he was hardly ever better than on the day he won the Railway.
Craft Memory defied his cranky young attitude to win his first seven races.
He had been foaled out in the paddock and Campbell recalled, having taken his dogs out in the ute to round up his cows, seeing a "dark shape" under a fence. He put the colt over his shoulders and carried him a kilometre back to the stables to reunite him with his mother.
The gelding got a bad throat infection soon after his Bunbury Stakes win and Murdoch University told Campbell there was "no hope to go on with him". But he got him back to the track for three more wins, including the Belmont Sprint.
After Tom's racing career ended, Campbell gave him to a friend's two daughters, who rode him in showjumping events. Soon after he came home and struck up what was originally a testy friendship with Craft Memory, but it developed into something special.
"It was very rocky to start off with because Tom was a paddock boss and a bully," he said.
"But over time they became inseparable."
