One of the stories that never came out following her 22nd win at Ascot:
Four days later, in the solitary confinement of a quarantine yard in Newmarket, she was attacked by a swarm of bees. They left the imposing mare squealing in pain, visibly distressed and badly swollen.
Her closest companion, Tony Haydon, recalls the scene as the cruellest episode suffered by a horse in his care, and the immediate sense of dread it prompted.
“I thought she wasn’t going to make it. I thought I was going to be coming home without her.”
The emergency call had gone to the vet who, on arrival, shot her full of antihistamines.
“She was in that much pain. It’s one of the cruellest things I’ve ever seen.”
Black Caviar settled as antibiotics were administered but it left her in worse shape still. During the course of medication she tucked up to 545kg, the lightest Haydon had ever seen her.
“I said to them ‘of all the things we can get bitten by in Australia, we come to bloody England where you’ve got squirrels and bees and we got stung by the bees’. And they’re the biggest bees you’ll ever see. I’ve never seen bees that big.”
