FEATURE STORY
LEGENDS OF THE LIGHTNING BY PATRICK BARTLEY
Some of the world’s fastest horses have competed in and won the great Black Caviar Lightning, and the Hayes family has ties to many of them. The vast empire of the Hayes training enterprise, numerically anyway, is not at the top of victories in the Black Caviar Lightning. While Bart Cummings and the Freedman family have an imposing record in the thousand-metre dash, the Hayes family have added a rich vein of notoriety to one of Australia’s revered sprint races. In 1987, not long out of school, a young David Hayes and his mother, Betty, purchased an alert young filly by the name of Special. Special showed husband and father, Colin Hayes extraordinary speed and all of Australia saw in late February of 1988 just how much explosive speed this youngster had. “We were all supremely confident that with luck she could win the Lightning, but she not only won, but recorded a time of 55.5 seconds, which sent racing historians looking for past times,” trainer David Hayes said from his stable in Sha Tin, Hong Kong. “Did you know it took until the mid-2000s for Black Caviar to run one-hundredth of a second faster than Special? And don’t forget, we didn’t have the sophisticated timing mechanisms that they did when Black Caviar was successful,” the legendary trainer said. It wasn’t the first success the Hayes dynasty had in the famed race, however. In the mid-1970s when races such as the Golden Slipper were only slowly gathering momentum, trainers, owners and breeders would dream of having a two-year old capable of competing against the older and stronger sprinters. In 1976 Colin Hayes went where so many had failed by starting a rich black filly byWithout Fear. Appropriately named Desirable, she became the pin-up filly of Australian racing. She didn’t let her fans down, becoming only the second youngster in the history of the race to win the Black Caviar
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