"He was struggling with the work needed to get him back to the races," said Allan Peard, stable foreman for trainer Bruce Wallace.
"That is even harder with a big, strong horse like him, so Bruce and his owners decided the time was right."
Not that Mufhasa had anything left to prove on the track.
Few modern-day gallopers race, let alone win, so consistently at the highest level and after a few luckless campaigns in Australia he finally broke through at group one level there two years ago.
That special moment came in the Toorak at Caulfield in October, 2011, and he added more Aussie gold at the highest level in the Futurity on the same track four months later, beating Cox Plate winner Pinker Pinker.
He was trained for those wins, and much of his career, by Stephen McKee, who surprisingly had Mufhasa taken off him for his last year of racing.
Wallace did his best with the mighty galloper even when he was past his best and after a small throat operation at the start of this year he returned to Australia.
That brought placings behind multimillion-dollar glamour boys All Too Hard in the Futurity and Pierro in the George Ryder in Sydney.
The latter, when he conceded Pierro 2.5kg and went down to the megastar by only a long neck, was one of the bravest runs of his incredible career.
Soon after came a failed trip to Hong Kong for the Champions Mile in May before this season's struggles.
Mufhasa, who also won the Telegraph at Trentham twice, won 20 of his 62 starts but was also placed 15 times, many of those starts in the most elite company.
Meanwhile, boom Zabeel colt Lifeline Express delivered as expected on debut at Matamata yesterday, to the relief of his co-trainer Paul Shailer.
"He's lived up to the hype and it was a pretty good win," he said. "They walked early and he got back on the fence and was racing a bit fiercely. I was nervous at the 600 when he didn't have a lot of room.
"Kelly [Myers] didn't panic though and she rode him beautifully and the split came at the right time and he put paid to them. He's going to learn plenty from that."
Shailer, who prepares the horse with his brother Kris, also had the added pressure of Lifeline Express' breeder-owner Nancy Wong making a lightning trip to Matamata to watch her colt.
"She flew in from Hong Kong in the morning and she was flying back out tonight," he said.
Out of a Danehill mare and passed in for $390,000 at Karaka last year, Lifeline Express had the race in safe keeping 250m from home and went to the line with three-quarters of a length to spare from Tiara Concerto.
As short as $9 now for the New Zealand Derby on March 1, Lifeline Express may make his next appearance at Ellerslie on January 11 in a 3-year-old event over 1600m.
Additional reporting, NZ Racing Desk
