Via Sistina: Chris Waller’s “Smooth Rocket” With The Funny Walk
Following in the footsteps of Winx, Nature Strip and Verry Elleegant, Sydney’s champion trainer Chris Waller has another standout that is taking Australian racing by storm.
CHRIS WALLER has had so many champion horses, even he might find it hard to remember what made them better than most. The thing is, for all champions, there is always one trait that sticks out.
Winx was arguably the greatest horse Australia has ever produced, but while she mightn’t have turned a hair in the mounting yard, she barely turned a head either. She was neat, nimble, elastic even, but nothing amazing to look at. Her rarest attribute was a phenomenal cadence or stride rate, her legs gently kissing the turf in a daisy-cutting motion and then rapidly cycling again. No horse could turn their legs over quicker.
Nature Strip’s was pure acceleration, anticipation. He was in the barriers one second, two lengths in front the next. He would sustain that top speed for so long, by the time any other horse had dared find a pocket of oxygen to muster another effort, it was often too late over a sprinting trip. He’d broken their hearts.
Verry Elleegant was a headcase, putting it politely. If there was a bird on the track of a morning, she would shy at it. A crossing, she would jump it. A gap, she would try to run through it. Her riders likened it to a daily dose of WrestleMania, so hard was she to control, throwing her head towards the stars and generally anywhere but straight. But when she ran, she kept running and running and running, a superior aerobic capacity you’d be lucky to see.
Each unique in their own way.
It’s so soon since each of those Waller stars dominated the Australian turf, but he has another scaling dizzying heights: Via Sistina. The mare is a fait accompli to be named Australia’s Horse of the Year at the end of the season.
But what makes her so good?
“The riders tell me she just feels like a machine,” Waller tells Idol Horse. “They ride some good horses – and they say she feels like a smooth rocket.”
The “smooth rocket” now has a song penned in her honour and is the best horse Chinese billionaire Zhang Yuesheng has raced in Australia under his rapidly growing Yulong brand.
At times, she seems unbeatable, toying with Australia’s middling weight-for-age horses and recreating memories of Winx in last year’s breathtaking Cox Plate win, which smashed all types of records in a race Waller’s legendary horse won four times.
It was scarcely believable she’d only started her Australian career seven months earlier, imported by Yulong after they forked out more than A$5 million for her at a Tattersalls Mares Sale, a price befitting a European G1 winner.
She got off the plane and Waller took one look at Via Sistina and saw a brute. Unlike Winx, she immediately filled his eye.
“She was big, she was imposing and she was like a basketballer,” Waller says. “Not refined, but you could see there was a motor there. How she would adapt to Australia, we had no idea. (Absolutely) no idea. First impressions: she was big, powerful and strong, but a bit hollow. She wasn’t the complete Australian horse.”
Waller is a self-made superpower of Australian racing who runs a giant modern business with an old school touch. He’s never completely dived into the science of his horses, and his results have never really warranted him to. But his riders have an idea about what sorts his best from the rest.
Chris Harwood has been one of his trusty track riders for years, and his job is to pilot Via Sistina among others. He estimates star sprinter Joliestar has the longest stride of any horse in the current stable at approximately 8.6 metres, Via Sistina coming in at about 8.2 metres. Anything over eight, Harwood says, and it’s an ingredient to be elite on the track.
Harwood also dabbles in a bit of songwriting, and in his ode to Via Sistina, quirkily uses a line “she walks kind of funny”.
“It’s weird to look at her walk, but when you’re on top of her it feels fluent, smooth and long,” Harwood tells Idol Horse. “Mechanically she can’t do anything slowly. She can’t walk slow, she can’t canter slow, she always wants to bowl along at a canter. And she obviously doesn’t gallop slow. I said to Waller, ‘I never galloped Winx properly, but I imagine it felt like this’. She’s an absolute steam train.”
The problem is that often she’s got no one to gallop with.
“What I loved about her is for a big animal she was just so efficient,” Via Sistina’s Newmarket-based former trainer George Boughey says. “Her work was better than anything we had at the time, which meant she ended up galloping solo.
“She was always very imposing and physical. She was a very raw and immature horse even when she came to me, but she always had this presence and aura of a filly that could keep progressing. Her work was always exceptional to be honest.”
But there was a day when it was not.
In the countdown to the Cox Plate each year, the race’s amphitheatric venue, Moonee Valley, hosts a public trackwork session for the contenders to familiarise themselves with the track. The circuit is like an enlarged and upturned saucer, a constant maze of acute turns, where horse and rider are fighting to stay in rhythm.
Winx was so well balanced she relished Moonee Valley’s slingshot bends; some other greats of the Australian turf never quite mastered it. Shockingly, Via Sistina tossed race jockey James McDonald last year in front of hundreds of people and multiple television cameras not usually allowed at trackwork, a result of bandages coming loose which she never typically wore. Thankfully she was safely caught, but it took what seemed an eternity, and only after she’d circumnavigated the track countless times.
How many?
“To this day I haven’t asked a question, but I’d say it would be close to four,” Waller says.
His heart sank.
“I felt sick,” he recalls. “I was worried it was a missed opportunity and she wouldn’t get her chance to show her true colours.”
Waller’s assistant trainer, Charlie Duckworth, who sought advice from his good friend Boughey about Via Sistina when she first arrived in Australia, got straight on the phone to Harwood. He asked him to fly to Melbourne to partner Via Sistina two days later and again at Moonee Valley, this time with almost no one watching. Retired Cox Plate-winning jockey Steve Arnold would help Harwood by riding Via Sistina’s stablemate Firestorm in the gallop.
“I could tell after 20 metres there was nothing wrong with her,” Harwood says. “And after one furlong, I was thinking, ‘this will win the Cox Plate’.”
By eight lengths?
“Definitely not by that much,” Harwood laughs. “Maybe a couple of lengths.
“(In the track gallop) Steve was trying to talk to me about, ‘this is where we quicken up, this is where we roll down this hill, we really blend into the race at this stage’. But she was so strong. It was probably the best she’s ever felt to be honest. I was just trying to hold on. He probably thought, ‘who is this ignorant bastard not even answering me’. But I’m absolutely wrestling this thing behind. When I got off, I said (to Waller), ‘you’ve got to run her’.”
She beat Winx’s race record by almost a full two seconds.
The race was set up to be quick with noted tearaway leader Pride Of Jenni, but even Via Sistina’s most ardent backers were left aghast with one of the most scintillating wins in Australian horse racing history. The faster the tempo, the better Via Sistina is, gobbling up fading frontrunners with her enormous gait.
These days, Boughey will rise at all hours of a cold English morning to watch a horse with a rare distinction of winning a Group 1 in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The massive gait is still there, and Waller has chiselled away at the immaturity. Her Group 1 tally in Australia is seven … and counting.
“It’s sad to see good horses go, but it’s even better to see them go on and do good things for other trainers,” Boughey says.
At seven years of age, Waller will take one race, one campaign at a time. He’s got a healthy and happy horse who, as Boughey says, can almost go around at $1.50 each time she runs, such is her dominance in Australia. It’s not quite Winx-like odds, but it’s not far off.
And Waller knows he will never get another Winx, but this might be the closest he’ll ever have to it ∎
