Derby Agony Adds Fuel To Newnham’s Champions Day Fire: ‘It Still Doesn’t Sit Right With Me’

IT TAKES A FEW minutes to get to Mark Newnham’s yard, tucked quietly away in the Olympic Stables behind the sweeping bend that brings horses into the Sha Tin straight. A golf cart skims along behind the back straight, leaving behind the full-throttle of the main training complex and entering a calmer pocket of the racecourse, which seems to match the man, the method and the mood.

His assistant, Henry Wong, is at the wheel, with Mark sat beside him. Karen Lin, Newnham’s secretary, rides along in the back, keeping owners up to date via WhatsApp as the cart trundles along the well-worn route the horses take to and from the track each morning.

“We walk the horses back each day so it takes a little longer, but I wouldn’t swap being down here in a million years. It’s perfect for us,” Newnham says as the cart approaches the entrance to his stable. 

While some of the previous trainers to occupy the Olympic Stables had a long list of grievances, the quieter, greener and more spacious environment away from the hustle and bustle of the main complex seems made for Newnham. His results tell the same story; he had 31 wins in his first season and has surpassed that number with over a quarter of the 2024-25 campaign remaining.

Inside the main office, a one-year-old wirehaired Jack Russell named Ralph trots up to greet you from under Newnham’s desk, tail in full swing. The atmosphere is as neat and composed as the trainer himself: a whiteboard on the wall splits horses into barrier trial assignments at Conghua and Sha Tin, while a desk is quietly humming with handwritten notes and rider names. Two pairs of riding boots are lined in front of a filing cabinet, a helmet resting nearby.

“I ride because I like doing it rather than because I think it makes a huge difference as a trainer,” he says. “It can be helpful with horses where you can’t work out what’s exactly going on, but we have a good team of riders in the stable and Henry is a great rider as well.

“People think that I must ride all my best horses but funnily enough I’ve never sat on My Wish. Most of the time I ride the ones that you’re trying to figure out what may or may not be going wrong.”

My Wish is the horse who took Newnham to within a breath of Hong Kong Derby (2000m) glory in March and now stands to face his first Group 1 test in Sunday’s FWD Champions Mile.

While it was a monumental effort for his diminutive galloper to finish within a short head of Cap Ferrat in the city’s most prestigious race, it’s clear that the pain of the agonising defeat still lingers.

“It still doesn’t sit well with me,” he admits. “People mention it all the time and it’s not a good feeling.

“When we drew gate 14 on the Thursday it let the air out of the tyres pretty quickly, but I thought we came up with a good race plan and Luke executed it well. He just fell an inch short and you can’t do much about that.

“But looking ahead to Sunday we go into the race optimistic. They’re all top-class horses when you get to that level so there will be nowhere to hide for him, but I think he’ll measure up to this grade whether it’s this time around or next season.”

The boy who once sat in racecourse press rooms in Sydney, shadowing his father John – a sports editor at the Sydney Morning Herald – didn’t dream of becoming a racing writer. He wanted to be part of the action.

His maternal grandfather, Bert Condon, was a jockey in Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s and summers were spent on his small stud farm. By 15, Newnham had made his mind up. “I cleaned out my school desk before the holidays started,” he recalls with a wry smile. “I knew I wasn’t going back.”

He went to Bobby Thomson’s yard and within a few years, he was on the road as travelling foreman for the legendary Bart Cummings, charged with shepherding a string of Group 1 horses – Beau Zam, Sky Chase, Campaign King – across the country.

“I was travelling those horses around pretty much all year and one year I was only in Sydney for three of the 12 months,” Newnham said. “For a young man at 19 and 20 it was a great lifestyle and a lot of responsibility.”

It was during those years that he met Donna, his wife, who later moved to Sydney from Western Australia – a move that helped usher in another chapter for the pair.

“For a single man on the road I was probably at 60 or 61 kilos when I was travelling thanks to a takeaway and a couple of beers every night,” Newnham said. “But when Donna moved to Sydney my lifestyle habits improved greatly and the minimum weight also changed. That’s when I seriously considered having a crack at riding.

“I didn’t think it would last more than a few years but it ended up lasting nearly 20. It was great and a really good part of my life but, looking back, I probably rode a couple of years too long.” 

As a jockey and track rider, Newnham forged a respected career in the saddle, winning three premierships at Kembla Range, enjoying stints in Macau and South Korea and was best known for his association with Gai Waterhouse.

While he retired from riding in 2011 and settled into his role as assistant trainer to Waterhouse at Tulloch Lodge, it was a fall 10 years earlier that led him to seriously consider training as a viable next step.

“In 2001, I had a fall at Hawkesbury on one of Gai’s horses and I broke my shoulder,” Newnham said. “I couldn’t do much but within about two weeks Gai had me clocking horses and watching trackwork. She said, ‘trust me, it will help you.’

“She was right, it kept me in the routine and it taught me a lot. I was down there with one arm in a sling with a stopwatch in it and a pair of binoculars in the other. That probably set me on the path to where I am now because I’d never really thought about training up to that point.” 

He was a trusted set of hands for Waterhouse – in the saddle at home for great horses like 2012 Golden Slipper winner Pierro – and, much like his time spent with Cummings, he got a taste of handling top-class horses.

“I’ve been lucky that the stables and the horses I’ve been involved with right from the start gives you experience of what a really good horse is and how to handle a really good horse,” he says.

“Right through until I finished with Gai that was the case so, when you start up on your own, it’s not foreign that you get a good horse. Sometimes you can see with small trainers that they get a good horse out of nowhere and because they haven’t had that exposure before, they can overthink everything a little bit.”

Newnham eventually had to make a choice by the time Adrian Bott was being lined up as Waterhouse’s next assistant: stay and become third-in-command, or go out on his own. He decided against certainty and rolled the dice in 2016, giving himself three years to succeed.

“Of course, things changed when Gai sold the business,” Newnham said. “I had to make the decision whether I should go it alone or basically go from being number two to number three.

“For the first six months training on my own I was thinking ‘what the hell have I done’, but then you start to have runners and winners and it flows from there.

“I was going to give it three years and pour everything into it. I can honestly say that I would not have continued if I was not on an upward trajectory. I didn’t want to be a guy that was pushing around with 10 or 15 horses, going to ordinary meetings and trying to get a living. I’d worked too hard to do that.”

What emerged was a stable of 400 winners, Group 1 success and a training style that focussed on the horse. He kept his team small enough and manageable enough to know his horses as individuals instead of trying to head down the ‘mega-stable’ route of 150 horses or more.

“If you are the trainer at one of those stables, you are more like the CEO of a training company and that’s not something I wanted to do,” he says.

“But the reason I like getting up early every morning is because I like the horses. I still like riding work, I like to walk around the stable and know each horse by sight. But once you’re starting to train 150, 200 and above it gets ridiculous.”

In that respect, Hong Kong was always going to be a perfect fit for Newnham. Nearing the end of his second season in the city, he currently trains 68 horses with a maximum capacity of 70.

In the ultra-competitive jurisdiction, he also gets the chance to continue his stellar record of mentoring an up-and-coming jockey in the form of the South African young gun Ferraris. During his time in Australia, Newnham helped guide a trio of riders to become champion apprentices in Robbie Dolan, Tom Sherry and Tyler Schiller.

“I’m still in contact with all of them and they’ll still ask me to look at a few things, especially suspensions: ‘can we appeal this boss,’ they’ll say,” Newnham recalls as Henry enters to discuss their upcoming entries for Happy Valley.

“When Robbie won the Melbourne Cup last year, Donna and I were cheering like mad in the lounge room. I sent him a message after and he rang me back that afternoon. I didn’t expect him to call but he said ‘you’re the second person I called after Mum’.

“Even when we have Sydney races on the TV, Donna will always say ‘have our boys got any rides in this?’, which is always nice.”

While Ferraris does not fit the exact same mould as an apprentice, the 23-year-old is the youngest expatriate rider in the Hong Kong ranks and he is firmly under the wing of the Australian trainer – a third of Ferraris’ 36 wins for the 2024-25 season have been for Newnham’s stable.

Both he and Newnham will have a shot at redemption when My Wish has his first crack at Group 1 level this Sunday at Sha Tin. 

Whether it’s this time, or in December, or next season, Newnham is convinced his gelding belongs at the top level. When he speaks about the horse, there is not just a sense of hope, but knowing. A belief earned the hard way: from Sydney press rooms as a young lad, from watching trackwork in a sling and from the audacious move to go out on his own.

“We moved over in June 2023 so to have a horse like him already makes you hungry for a few more,” Newnham said. 

History tells us that when Newnham gets his hands on that talent, he will definitely make the most of it ∎

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