Archie da Silva - Reflections of a Lifetime of Owning Racehorses

Extracts from a speech originally scheduled for Club Lusitano

As an owner of horses, God has been very kind to me and I haveowned many horses (good and not so good) in my career as a horse owner, so I have experienced the ups and downs of ownership. I believe I had more than 80 winnings in my career.

I am a bit of a religious bugger – I was recently asked why someone like me who is blasphemous and swears a lot – how can I be religious – to which I said I have my God who has been very good to me.

My first horse was in Macau in 1990 – Thundersky which was the name of my father’s last horse. In his first run we thought he had won but he actually lost by a nose and ran second – he then had 9 seconds because he was a very good horse and let others run and then won once only and was retired due to leg problems.

My first horse in Hong Kong was in 1991 Nervous Witness (the first) who won 7 races – Geoff Lane and I went to New Zealand and picked the horse ourselves and Danny Brereton rode my first winner in Hong Kong. He gave me great pleasure, so when he retired at 9 years old, I sent him back to the original farm he was born to enjoy his retirement. As an old horse, I paid NZD 1,000 per month for his upkeep. It seemed a good idea at that time, but the bloody thing went on to live another 14 years.

My third horse came about through Danny Brereton who is currently in rehabilitation in Australia after a bad fall and I hope he gets well. I had a permit and Danny who was a great judge of horses riding trials for David Price in Australia, called Geoff Lane up and said he had a wonderful horse owned by David Price and asked me to buy it. I did not know David Price at that time, but I was very good friends with his partner Rod Dufficy – I recalled having dinner with Rod at Gaddi’s in the Peninsula Hotel and we were on our third bottle of wine when Rod called Pricey if he would sell the horse to me. Pricey said the horse was promised to David Hayes and he had to stick to his promise, so we called up David Hayes at 11:00pm that night, woke him up and asked if he would release the horse to me. Hayes said yes on condition he was to train the horse and being a practical owner (although I thought I was at that time loyal) I agreed that Hayes trains the horse and I bought my new horse Prime Witness who went on to make Class One and won 9 races and lots of prize money for me – 2 days later I called Geoff Lane and told him Hayes would train Prime Witness and the next morning at track work they nearly came to fisticuffs and my friendship with Geoff then tapered off.

During the early 90s, I would say 1993, I owned horses in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Macau and Hong Kong and I owned a horse in New Zealand jointly with my good friend Ginger Tankard whose son was the Trainer of my horse – Shatin Heights – he won 6 straight races with a young apprentice on board, and we entered him for the New Zealand Derby. Ginger who was great friends with Dave O’Sullivan was requested by Lance O’Sullivan to ride the horse as he had no rides in the Derby. Ginger insisted to keep loyalty (this is where I also learnt loyalty does not always work) and stuck with the young apprentice and during the race we led all the way with Dave O’Sullivan standing

next to me cheering for us. At the last moment, an Australian filly – a late entry – ridden by Lance O’Sullivan came through and beat us by a nose and Dave turned around to me and said – change the jockeys and you would have won the race. The filly was called Popsy and to add insult to injury that evening our Aussie friends had dinner in the same place we were and the whole night they were calling out the name of the filly Popsy as they were getting drunk. This taught me a lesson – loyalty as an owner is important but when it comes to big races you need the best jock onboard.

The Prime Witness purchase brought me into a great friendship with David Price whom I consider one

of the most accomplished. Bloodstock Trading Company where he stocks the horses, and he is the best

in the world and he helped me write this speech, but I did put that bit in myself!

Pricey after selling Prime Witness to me, then sold the great Silent Witness to me. Silent Witness was

purchased as a yearling by John Foote on behalf of Pricey and prepared by David Hall in Australia – prior to Hong Kong he won a Barrier Trial at Ballarat ridden by Patrick Payne by 10 lengths. Patrick Payne is the King of understatements, and he told Pricey – “Yeah I would sell that to a friend”. Tony Cruz trained Silent Witness and Felix Coetzee rode him throughout his career of 18 wins – 17 straight wins from day one. Tony used to tell me one of the reasons Silent Witness was so incredible was because he was a very healthy horse throughout his career – no illnesses at all – not even a cough or mucus. Tony Cruz keeps telling me that Silent Witness was a gift from God – I had to stop Pricey walking around calling himself God. Silent Witness was a true champ and even today he still holds the world record of 17 straight wins for a male horse, as Black Caviar and Winx have since broken this record, but they are fillies.

It was misfortune the day he lost to Bullish Luck by a nose. Gerard Mosse was instructed by Tony to bring Bullish Luck to the outside which was the way he raced, and we would be the quinella. As luck would have it, three openings came up on the rails and Mosse took it and nipped us at the last moment by a nose. If we had stuck to 1,000m up to 1,400m we do not know how many more wins Silent Witness had up his sleeve. The second misfortune incident was going to Japan for the Nakayama Sprinters Stakes which we won but he then contracted a very bad horse virus and when he came back to Hong Kong he never really recuperated and although he later ran a second in the Internationals and a third in a top race, he had a degenerating ligament and his bumpers were covered with blood after the races and that’s when I decided – he is a champ – and enough is enough. He had given me a great time – he was world champ – broke Cigar’s 16 straight wins record – made me a lot of prize money. I could not ask for more and I told myself God only gives you one champ in your lifetime. Going forward you can never dream to have another horse like this – Pricey promised me he will find me a good horse for double the price and half the ability.

In the interim years – I have many more horses from Pricey which all did well for me - some winning 5, 6, or 7 career wins but also sometimes a heartache – I had one horse which had bone chips (after the

operation, I gave the bone chips to David Price) and another horse that was a roarer. The roarer was called Crown Witness and he had 7 wins and at the beginning of his 5-year-old season, Tony Cruz trialed him and he won the trial by 6 lengths and Tony was touting him to be a champion but when he went to the races he ran third last as he started roaring. In those days there were no tieback operations which today can be 70% to 80% successful – so after 2 more roaring races we retired him.

Horses gave me great pleasure, but you never know when youget a bleeder, bone chips or roarer – the latest one Superb Witness had a kissing spine – so horses must stay healthy andas an owner you must accept the ups and downs and enjoy the ups when you can. The game of ownership: “If you are in

it for long enough you will get a bit of everything.” – Forest Gump said that.

Now after many years along comes a horse called Bill’s Kick in Australia – David Price trialed him and he won his trial by 6 lengths – the second and third horses came out and won a few races franking his form, so I bought him and he came to Hong Kong. Whilst David Hayes trained Prime Witness when he was leaving Hong Kong, contrary to David Hayes version of events, Silent Witness went to Tony Cruz – so the timing of David Hayes coming back, it was fitting to give him the new horse. I wanted to call him Hostile Witness, but the Jockey Club rejected the name as there is a mare in Australia in breeding called Hostile Witness - so I decided to go back to the name Nervous Witness (now the second one). He won his first 5 races impressively and $9.8m in prize money, by 3 lengths and 3 3⁄4 lengths respectively under a tight hold from Zac Purton and he was being touted by both Zac and Hayes as a potential star, especially since he ran the second quarter by 19.86 seconds which is fantastic. (After 2 runs we thought we had the next Silent Witness, and this was confirmed by David Hayes and the jock Zac – remember this Trainer has been out of town for 18 years and he is still readjusting to the quality in Hong Kong – anyway you know Hayes he is a slow learner.) However, we came to his third race and God humbled me and brought me down to earth again and he disappointed us as at the 500m mark when Zac pressed the button, he felt lethargic and I and Hayes both presume this was due to the top weight of 133 lbs he was carrying, especially for a young horse. Silent Witness never carried a weight higher than 130 lbs and sometimes the extra 3-4 lbs could be what breaks the camel’s back. Anyway, we came to his fourth race, and he met up with that potential superstar Master Eight, also a Pricey horse and he beat us fair and square. Perhaps his third race took too much out of him. We will not know as this is the vagaries of horse racing. Nervous Witness the second gave me great pleasure but he is now retired due to a bleeding attack, and we have sent him back to Australia to race there trained by JD and Ben Hayes, David’s sons and hope he can win a Group Race or two for us.

Those of us who are in racing, we must be grateful to the Jockey Club for their outstanding job to keep the show in the road and the horses turning up for the Internationals are impressive.

You can see that owners live on hope and expectations but for me I leave my trust in God and hopefully I can continue to enjoy winners and happy racing.

Meanwhile I now have two new horses, hopefully good – Conspiracy Witness and Reliable Witness. They will be racing soon.

Thank you to the Hong Kong Jockey Club for keeping racing safe and healthy and continually

successful.

Time Magazine Tribute to Silent Witness

The Measure of a Horse

By Zoher Abdoolcarim published in 8 February 2007

The conventional way to take the measure of an athlete is to concentrate on the numbers: Grand Slam or PGA titles, touchdown passes, new records. By that yardstick alone, a racehorse called Silent Witness was a winner many times over. Just retired, Silent Witness was unbeaten at his first 17 starts, eclipsing the 16-win streaks of past greats Ribot, Citation and Cigar. For three years running (2003 to 2005), the Paris-based International Federation of Horseracing Authorities ranked him the world’s fastest sprinter. And over five seasons of racing, he amassed $8 million in prize money. Yet those numbers, impressive as they are, don’t tell the whole story of Silent Witness’s rise to eminence.

You probably never saw Silent Witness race in the flesh, and may not have caught him on TV either. For his home was not the dirt tracks of the U.S. or the impossibly green paddocks of Britain and Ireland, but a splendid racing complex set amid skyscrapers in Hong Kong’s Sha Tin New Town. To the folk of Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of China, Silent Witness was a hero; to true followers of the turf, worldwide, a legend. Now, put to pasture, he deserves to be known for who he really was.

On Sunday, Silent Witness ran his last race at the Sha Tin course, the arena for all but one of his triumphs. There was to be no fairy-tale finish. After more than a year of assorted ailments and injuries during which he had gone winless, Silent Witness limped in ninth of 10 runners whom he would have pulverized in his prime. The bleak result didn’t diminish the ardor for the mahogany 7-year-old. Upon trotting back to the unsaddling yard, Silent Witness was given an emotional reception of cheers and tears. Railbirds, decked in owner Archie da Silva’s green and black, waved Silent Witness flags and posters. Da Silva, a hard-headed Hong Kong businessman, wept. Trainer Tony Cruz, a Catholic, described his charge to local reporters as “a gift from God.”

Why such devotion to an over-the-hill hack? This wasn’t a case of, say, a blue-blooded Barbaro coming to a poignant end at the apex of his career. Silent Witness inspired loyalty and fervor partly because he was a global champion. He repeatedly trounced many of the world’s best speedsters. For the Hong Kong Jockey Club, internationally renowned for its wealth and incomparable facilities but not, till recently, the quality of its thoroughbreds, Silent Witness showed the Club packed horsepower too. Though racing has played a central role in Hong Kong’s social and economic life since the British first colonized the barren rock, its citizens are not known for their sentimentality at the track. Yet attendance at Sha Tin would surge up to 50% whenever Silent Witness was on the card. His exploits even lifted Hong Kong’s morale when the city badly needed a boost. In 2003, the first year he was named the world’s top-ranked sprinter, the territory was reeling from sars, economic uncertainty and

political tensions. Silent Witness gave Hong Kongers a sense of pride, and reminded them of their can-do spirit. He was Hong Kong’s Seabiscuit.

Like Seabiscuit, who lifted American hearts during theGreat Depression, there was little in Silent Witness’s background to suggest he would one day be so dominant. Born in Australia, Silent Witness is the son of El Moxie, a middling U.S. sprinter, and Jade Tiara, a winner of minor Australian races. Because of his modest pedigree, Silent Witness was sold as a yearling to horse trader David Price for just $39,000. He was also gelded, a procedure in which a thoroughbred’s testicles are surgically removed. It’s commonly done to colts that have no stud value, or that get too frisky or, as with Silent Witness, bulky. “We didn’t know what we had,” says Price. “Now everyone wants his nuts.”

In Hong Kong, Silent Witness proved a thorough professional, and despite—or because of—that cruel

cut, a perfect gentleman. He never threw a tantrum, and was so laid-back that Cruz called him lazy. Proffer a carrot and he wouldn’t crunch it like other horses, but nibble at it from your hand. His running style was as straightforward as his personality: bound out of the barrier, cruise to the lead or park just off it, gallop relentlessly to the line. “He had the reflexes of a springbok,” says South African Felix Coetzee, the only jockey to have ridden Silent Witness in a race. “The moment you gave him the signal to go, he jumped to it.”

The history of racing is replete with highly touted thoroughbreds whose pedigree and conformation were exquisite, yet who wound up duds. Instead, it comes down to a special, intangible quality— call it spirit or heart—that you can’t measure. Silent Witness had it. As a young colt, recalls his Australian breeder Ian Smith, he would “play up badly” if he were not the first fed or walked in the morning: “He dominated his paddock and was always the leader of the horses he ran with. There was something in his eye that said: Look, I’m good.” Not just good but, as those who saw Silent Witness will testify, simply and truly great.

Silent Witness

Starts: 29

Wins: 18

2nds: 3

3rds: 2

Prize Money: HKD$ 62,496,396

First race: 26 December 2002

Last race: 4 February 2007

Record winning streak of 17 wins, 26 December 2002 to 24 April 2005