A Scribbled Name On A Stable Door: The Twist Of Fate That Led Tshepiso Moagi To Autumn Glow
The story of a South African horseman who journeyed across continents in search of adventure, and the chance connection that saw him become a key player in the rise of Australian racing’s unbeaten superstar.
A Scribbled Name On A Stable Door: The Twist Of Fate That Led Tshepiso Moagi To Autumn Glow
The story of a South African horseman who journeyed across continents in search of adventure, and the chance connection that saw him become a key player in the rise of Australian racing’s unbeaten superstar.
14 November, 2025THE STANDARD winning presentation photo is always a riveting exercise in people watching.
The jockeying for position is not unlike the intense opening stages of the Golden Eagle – nobody wants to be stuck out wide – everybody is looking for a prominent spot on the podium: trainer, jockey, sponsors, race club officials and owners. Then there are the rest: sponsors, friends of connections, friends of friends and anybody else tenuously related.
If Oprah Winfrey was still handing out free car keys, even the talk show queen might not have enough to go around for people who want to be photographed next to a horse after it wins a feature race.
Yet one person always seems to be missed, often obscured behind masses of smiling people: the strapper, faithfully trying to control the horse with the impossible task of getting it to look somewhere near the camera.
After Australia’s emerging queen of the turf, Autumn Glow, won the A$10 million Golden Eagle at Royal Randwick, if you looked closely enough you could see a broad smile just poking through a horde of people.
It belonged to Tshepiso Moagi.
Moagi will never attract the headlines of Chris Waller and James McDonald, Australia’s best trainer-jockey combination, even though no one spends more time with the unbeaten Autumn Glow than he does.
Yet his story of how he came to tend to arguably Australia’s best racehorse is one of fortune and fate.
As an electrical engineering student at university back in his native South Africa, the tiny Moagi’s mind was wandering. He wasn’t content with being stuck in a lecture theatre or office every day, and on the urgings of a friend who told him he had the build of a jockey, he started looking into horses.
The Turffontein track was only 10 minutes down the road. With many prospective South African jockeys required to enter an academy at a young age, Moagi found time might have already passed him by at 22.
Undaunted, he instead set his mind to being a trackwork rider, later steering winners in amateur races throughout the country.
But there was always a yearning to travel outside Africa, and as part of the Mike de Kock team, he would ask to campaign horses abroad.
“Mike would always send horses to England or Dubai, but England was too cold for me,” Moagi laughs. “So, I ended up going to Dubai. From there, I said, ‘I want to travel more’.”
Via Africa – a triple Group 1-winner and South Africa’s champion sprinter in 2013-14 – finished her racing days under de Kock in Dubai, where Moagi would campaign her. It was in Dubai where Moagi was introduced to a former representative of powerhouse Australian trainer Darren Weir, who proposed the idea of Moagi coming to work with the stable in the future.
It took a few years and included a stop in Macau, but eventually Moagi decided to start a new chapter of his journey in Australia.
But two weeks before he was due to travel, Weir’s colossal training empire came crashing down when police and racing authorities raided one of his stables and found electrical devices commonly referred to as “jiggers,” often used to send a shock through racehorses to prompt them to run faster.
Weir later faced criminal charges over the matter and is still serving a disqualification from the racing industry. It’s not due to expire until 2026.
“It stalled me,” Moagi says. “But the lady who was doing the visas said, ‘you can work for Chris’.”
Moagi barely knew anything about Waller, who along with Weir, dominated Australian racing at the time.
“I only knew about him when I tried to get some information about Australian racing,” Moagi says. “That’s when Winx was at her peak.”
Waller has hundreds of new horses enter his stable in any given year. He has owners spread across the entire spectrum of the industry, and still others bang on the door to be involved with him.
Arrowfield Stud supremo John Messara is considered one of the most influential breeders in modern Australian history, and he had just bought a A$1.8 million filly by The Autumn Sun, with only one instruction for Waller: don’t race her as a two-year-old.
“I said to Chris at the time, ‘this is a big filly and I think she’s going to need a bit of time. He said, ‘that’s fine’,” Messara tells Idol Horse.
When the filly found a box at Waller’s enormous Rosehill operation, Moagi was walking through the barn one day. He saw a scribble on her stable door, which identified her from her bloodlines.
Her mother was Via Africa.
“I said, ‘wait, let me just double check to see if I’m right’,” Moagi says. “I asked the foreman. I said, ‘I don’t care how good she’s going to be, if she can be half as good as the mum and the dad, she’ll be good. I want to stay with her, please’.”
The foreman said yes.
“So, that’s how I ended up with her,” Moagi says. “And nobody knows what babies are going to be like.”
Moagi’s baby has been a force of nature since arriving on the scene, winning the G1 Epsom Handicap and then repelling overseas raiders Panja Tower and Seagulls Eleven to win the Golden Eagle, the eighth straight win to begin her career.
As horses circled the paddock before the Golden Eagle, the longer the parade went on, the more agitated many of Autumn Glow’s rivals became. The mare, prepared by the endlessly patient Waller, never turned a hair.
“Her nature? It was quiet as,” Moagi says. “You see her, it’s exactly the same (as Via Africa). Quiet, easy to work with … you couldn’t ask for better horses.
“I remember her first race at Rosehill. We were in the first race (of the day), there by ourselves and she was calm, like she’d done it so many times before.
“It takes a good horse and a mentally strong horse to be there by herself not seeing other horses in a new environment. Usually horses never stand there (like that). She was about to fall asleep.
“I thought, ‘that’s different’.”
Messara and his co-owners from Hermitage, who raced The Autumn Sun, have been on a rollercoaster of emotions as anticipation builds with each win. Messara has raced many champions before, but not one who has put together a winning sequence like this at the start of a career.
From the moment he laid eyes on her at the sales, he was hooked.
“I went there with my wife, the filly walked out of the box and she just knocked me over,” he said of inspecting Silverdale Farm’s draft.
“I didn’t open my mouth. I said, ‘thank you very much’ and walked away. I didn’t want to give any idea I was interested.
“They said later to me, ‘you bastard. You never gave us the slightest idea’. That’s a lesson I learnt from TJ Smith. I couldn’t go without her. I was gripped by her.”
And so is Moagi, the tiny South African who has travelled all around the world to unwittingly look after the same family.
He might not be front and centre of the presentation photo every time his superstar horse wins – which hopefully for racing fans will be many more times in the future – but Autumn Glow’s right hand man will be ever present. ∎
