The Fine Cotton ring-in racing scandal cost Wendy her career, but she's bounced back

WARNING: this story contains descriptions of cruelty towards animals that some readers may find distressing.

If anyone had walked past, they would have seen three blokes in gloves massaging hair dye into the hair of a full-grown racehorse.

The ground was littered with the empty tubes of Clairol the men had poured out and mixed in buckets.

Months of scheming, and their con had come to this: giving a horse a makeover.

With their makeshift hair salon, they were trying to salvage one of the most difficult scams in horse racing: a «ring-in».

The premise of a ring-in is simple: enter a known slow horse in a race, making sure the odds are high so there's plenty of money to be won, and then at the last minute, swap it for a faster horse and hope nobody notices.

But pulling it off is much harder.

The plan was to swap eight-year-old picnic racer Fine Cotton out for a younger, much faster horse named Bold Personality.

The idea was to fleece bookmakers around Australia out of millions of dollars.

Instead, it ended with everyone losing their money and three men in jail.

That's because there was one fairly major problem: Bold Personality looked nothing like Fine Cotton.

The horse was a lighter bay colour, while Fine Cotton was a rich, dark brown with white socks on its legs.

And so one of the men had spent the night driving to chemists throughout suburban Brisbane buying boxes of dye until they had enough to transform Bold Personality into its slower counterpart.

They woke up the next morning, the day of the big race, expecting to see the impostor horse transformed.

Instead, the dodgy overnight dye-job had left Bold Personality fire-engine red.

For their plan to work, spectators would have had to overlook a majestic animal — a full-grown racehorse —