'I know how Phar Lap died'

KELLY HODEL/Waikato Times

SPEAKING OUT: Trainer John Mason thinks it's time to tell the truth over Phar Lap's death.

Does this man know how Phar Lap died?

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Green feed killed champion racehorse Phar Lap, says a South Waikato horse trainer.

Tokoroa's John Mason says Phar Lap's strapper Tommy Woodcock told him the real reason for the sudden death in 1932, during a US and Mexico campaign, but asked him to keep it a secret while he was still alive.

Mason said the time was right to make public what Woodcock told him.

"He said they were coming from Mexico and [Phar Lap] hadn't had any grass for a couple of weeks," Mason said.

"Driving down the road they spotted this paddock of lucerne. They took the horse off the float and gave him a big feed of lucerne. He got a crook guts that night and died.

"They panicked so they came up with the story that the horse was poisoned, to cover their butts."

Mason, 64, said Woodcock told him the story in Melbourne in 1982, the year he took his galloper Tallifer to Australia to prepare for the Melbourne Cup.

Tallifer didn't settle well at the Epsom stables and Woodcock invited Mason to base the horse at his own stables.

Mason believes Woodcock confided in him after he learned that New Zealand training legend Dick Mason was his great uncle. Dick Mason was the training mentor of Phar Lap's trainer Harry Telford.

"[Tommy] said he wanted to tell me a story that he didn't want to tell anyone else and he made it very clear to me that no Australian would know until after he was dead, so he meant what he said.

"I don't know why he told me. Telford and RJ Mason had a connection and we were probably broaching on the subject when he decided this is the guy I'm going to tell.

"It's going to hurt a lot of Australians' pride but the truth needs to be told."

Woodcock became famous as Phar Lap's inseparable strapper, riding him in all his trackwork and often sleeping outside the horse's stable.

He took over as Phar Lap's trainer in 1932 when the horse was shipped to the US. Right up until his death in 1985 Woodcock maintained that the horse wasn't poisoned despite that being the popular theory.

Forensic testing in 2006 suggested Phar Lap was given a potentially deadly dose of arsenic about 35 hours before his death. Auckland physicist Graeme Putt, the author of a new book Phar Lap - the Untold Story, launched to coincide with the unveiling of a Phar Lap statue in Timaru on Wednesday, claims the horse had no symptoms to suggest arsenic poisoning and speculated that he probably died from a bacterial infection.

Mason said he was continually frustrated at experts' theories and was relieved to finally put the matter right.

"I heard a bit about those scientists coming up with the theory about bacteria – it's a load of rubbish.

"Tommy was very sincere in what he told me and very positive that he wasn't going to tell anyone else.

"I can see the common sense in that because lucerne is pretty violent in dairy cows and certainly in a horse that hasn't had any green feed for a while."

Woodcock told Melbourne's Herald-Sun newspaper in 1983 that he had a theory about the reason for Phar Lap's death but he refused to reveal it.

"There was another possible way he died. But I don't want to say because I don't know for sure," Woodcock had said.

- © Fairfax NZ News