Tough gelding Tuff Tu Mus back winning races after struggling with pre-race anxiety

News.com.au

25-06-2025

Kava producer John Fordham has survived a terrifying earthquake in Vanuatu, now he hopes his gritty gelding Tuff Tu Mus can send tremors through next year's Queensland winter carnival.
Tuff Tu Mus means 'bloody tough' in Bislama, the national language of Vanuatu where his owner Fordham, who hails from small town Croppa Creek near Moree in northern NSW, runs a kava factory.
The four-year-old was meant to compete in this year's winter carnival but plans went awry when he started to sweat up before races and became jittery at the track.
However, Sunshine Coast trainer David Vandyke changed the diet for Tuff Tu Mus and made some management tweaks which have seemingly solved the anxiety issues for the son of All Too Hard who has won his past five races.
Tuff Tu Mus triumphed in his last start at Doomben, where he is unbeaten, in a Benchmark 85 (1350m) earlier this month and will next race at the same track in a Class 6 over 1600m on July 12.
'We didn't run him in any big races this winter because of his behaviour before and after the races,' said Fordham from Luganville in Vanuatu on Wednesday.
'I'm excited about the next winter carnival and the opportunities for the horse and he will have a season of racing experience behind him.
'This was his first season, so we've learnt a lot about the horse.
'We have three jockeys that have ridden him for his five wins (from seven races) which gives us more choices when weights become an issue.'
It is an amazing turnaround considering that veterinarians told Fordham there was a high chance the tenacious horse would never even get to the races after he had cut himself 'to the bone' as a two-year-old.
'There was about a 40 per cent chance (of never racing) so we sent him to the doctors in Gatton and they nursed him for two weeks and got him back,' said Fordham, who bought Tuff Tu Mus for $140,000 at the 2022 Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale.
'Six or eight months later we got him ready again and there were no signs of soreness or anything.
'We were getting him ready for Magic Millions and there was another race at Doomben.
'A few days before the race, Dave rings up and says 'the horse has cut his tendon'. We doctored him up again and gave him time until he was a four-year-old.
'Now there are no signs of the cut, no swelling, no soreness. It all seems to have healed itself.'
It was a frightening moment for Fordham but nothing compared to the terror of three powerful earthquakes - with magnitudes of 7.8, 7.7 and 7.3 - that hit Vanuatu in October 2009, sparking a tsunami warning and sending thousands of Pacific islanders scurrying for shelter on higher ground.
'She was a rattler,' said Fordham, who owns a kava factory in Luganville, the Pacific nation's second largest city behind capital Port Vila.
'A few of the internal walls in the house cracked and broke.
'You could see the roof lift up. It cut a house just down the road from us in half, one part of the house was two feet below the other.
'It separated the bridge from the river. Railway power lines were bent 90 degrees.
'We have a strong French-built house and I hit the ground and went under the doorway but I couldn't get to my feet.
'I got bounced around and I could hear everything crashing in the house. It went on for what seemed like minutes.'