The Hayes voicemail that ruined a betting plunge

All is fair in love and war. Same goes for the punt.

Gavin Bedggood pulled off a well-executed go in the opener at Ballarat on Friday. He was widely celebrated for pulling off the plunge – but the true story has emerged that he missed out on the price – because of JD Hayes.

Enamorada, an unraced 4YO mare, was briefly posted as much as $11, though that price lasted less than a blink. Once the market settled, $6/$6.50 was widely available and punters were keen to step in. By race morning she was $3.80, and by the time the gates flew back she had crunched into $2.80, and the only thing that stopped her shortening was the gates crashing back.

The mare played her part perfectly – she bolted in.

Brilliant debut winner for So You Think

Enamorada (4m So You Think x Fortune Of War) for @GavinBedggood
270k buy for Adrian Hall from Edinburgh Park at @mmsnippets Gold Coast

Sire leading the Winners list – this #34.
And 3rd by Earnings@CoolmoreAus pic.twitter.com/M1A83xSoXj

— Breednet (@BreednetNews) September 19, 2025

Now things get interesting. Enamorada was once on the Lindsay Park stable and the boys rated her highly. Very highly.

And JD knew the plunge was on. In a voice message, he told friends the owner had previously suggested hiding the mare until she was raceday ready.

So when Hayes saw the horse was starting at Ballarat and had gun jockey Ethan Brown onboard, he knew what was to come.

“There’s one tomorrow, Gavin Bedggood, Enamorada, he got taken off us by the owner.”

“He’s a good fella, and all he told us to do was hide it, hide it, hide it.”

“Now I’m watching his trials, I reckon they’ve hidden it. They’ve got Brownie on it. Just check with Brownie what you think before you go in. But they backed it from $12 into $5, and I think it’s a…, I thought it was a listed class horse. I thought it was our best filly, but she just needed so much time. She got cast in a box, that was the last straw.”

“They moved it to Gavin, who he’s had good success with, and I was filthy on it because … I think she’s a really nice horse.”

So quick was Hayes, that by the time Bedggood went to get in on the action, the price had gone.

Bedggood told Betsy’s Backmarker’s podcast that the plan was to keep her quiet in trials and back the mare to shine on race day.

“She came to my stable with a bit of a rap and she had had a previous injury in a stable, so she had had a certain amount of time off the scene and came to me and she’s been very smooth sailing right the way through,” he said.

“Look, the ownership don’t mind a bet and I don’t mind one either, so I suppose a plan was hatched. We knew that she had good ability and she had shown us enough at home that we didn’t think she needed to be going out and spacing rivals at trial, so we did what we could to, you know, I suppose give her as quiet a time as what we could.”

The plan seemed to work. She opened $11 but unfortunately for Bedggood, he was too late.

”I had two runners at Bendigo (on Wednesday) and saddled up Fisherman’s Beach, who was a sick watch, and I was saddling up my second one, Furosshi, that was beat a head-by-a-head or something, and I got a text message from a few different people saying that the price had been knocked off and a phone call received that asked if it was me.”

“And it definitely was not. And, yeah, that was the disappointing part and then there was an audio that did the rounds on Thursday from the previous stable and, look, that’s good luck to anybody that got it, but it definitely wasn’t us.”

WATCH: JD Hayes spills the beans