From The Small Screen To The Big Time, Bjorn Baker Does Things His Way

IF YOU HAVEN’T already seen the videos, then you likely will soon. Bjorn Baker is in posh committee rooms, in public grandstands, in run-of-the-mill bars in pubs, even roaring loudly from the back seat of a taxi because he was late getting to the track after a delayed flight. He’s watching his horses win races and celebrating wildly, no matter where he is.

How do we know? Because his wife Andrea follows him around with a little mobile phone camera to catch every instant reaction from the ‘Big Brother’ of horse trainers.

How and where a trainer likes to watch their horses race is a fascinating case study.

Australia’s biggest handler, Chris Waller, prefers the anonymity of dim rooms with small screens at the bottom of cavernous grandstands, away from the spotlight. He watched Winx’s last ever outing, perhaps the most anticipated horse race in Australia this century, from a tiny enclave at the bottom of the Queen Elizabeth grandstand at Royal Randwick.

Octogenarian trainer Les Bridge won The Everest with Classique Legend and took it all in without anyone near him, leaning casually on a rail in an empty mounting yard, which was heaving with hundreds of people minutes earlier.

Young trainer Mitchell Freedman took his white knuckle ride by hooping and hollering right on the outside fence at Flemington when Skybird caused an upset in the Lightning Stakes, almost close enough he could touch his mare as she zoomed past.

But for Baker, his reactions can be played over and over again, immortalised digitally and helping drive his stable to new heights.

“I think it’s been great for our business, but it’s good for racing too,” the Sydney-based trainer tells Idol Horse. “A lot of people see the other side of it. It adds excitement and it’s real.

“I actually don’t have a lot of social media presence outside (of that). I don’t go on it and I am not active. I think it’s good to have that divide.

“But even when I go back to New Zealand for the races there, considering I have no runners, the amount of people who come up and want to say g’day or have a selfie, it’s unbelievable.

“From that point of view, it’s definitely been a massive help.”

In the modern age, the fight for owners in Australia, the most accessible jurisdiction in the world for everyday people to have shares in horses, is increasingly being waged on an online battleground.

Baker is doing better than most.

The former pharmacist has been a revelation since joining the Australian ranks more than a decade ago, bringing his larger-than-life personality to the sport, and with a pitch to owners: come have fun with my stable.

He’s a regular on the sportsman’s lunch circuit regaling funny tales to have an audience in fits of laughter. He often hijacks television interviews on racedays with his signature plug for his website. He’s even starred in a suite of television advertisements for a forklift company, which are being shown endlessly on Australian television at the moment. 

“I just knew they advertised all the time,” he laughs. “I thought, ‘well, if you don’t like me, in six weeks you’re going to dislike me even more’.”

But the public persona belies what his team and family see in private: a deep thinker and intelligent man who once wanted to pursue a career in medicine, and now relentlessly works on his craft as a horse trainer, while training to run marathons himself and compete in the new fitness craze Hyrox, a torture test for the exercise minded.

The son of retired New Zealand training legend Murray Baker, Bjorn was always destined for a life around horses. That was, until he crossed a little Shetland pony named Muffin.

“I remember getting bucked off by him when I was four and I was never that keen to ride again,” he says. “I got good at handling them on the ground more than riding.”

He also got good at maths, which was a natural fit for studying the odds in races. Having been raised in the small New Zealand town of Woodville, Baker reckons he had his first bet at the age of six. He was hooked.

“I knew my times tables much better than anyone else (in my class),” he says.

By the time he was in the latter stages of high school, his teachers recognised he was so gifted academically he skipped a year of school. He completed New Zealand’s Bursary, a secondary school qualification, and ended up studying pharmacy at university, which led to a 10-year career all over the world.

From working in Sydney he went to London and later Ireland, which led to a Contiki-like tour of the world’s great racetracks throughout Europe and the Middle East: from Royal Ascot to Baden-Baden to Chantilly and Dubai, chasing fun and hoping to win a mini fortune.

“I had a reasonable student loan that I still owed (in 2002),” Baker says. “I had $300 at 50-1 on Prized Gem (trained by his father Murray) to win the Brisbane Cup.”

She won.

“I actually paid a large majority of the student loan after that,” Baker jokes. “But I’ve always liked the form aspect and that’s definitely held me in good stead in terms of Sydney. I tend to know what works in terms of my training.”

Having decided to settle down and marry Andrea just before he was 30, Baker finally took the plunge and gave up pharmacy. He started working for his father, travelled some superstar horses to Australia such as Nom Du Jeu (which he backed at 40-1 to win the Australian Derby in 2008) and Lion Tamer, before going into partnership.

But he wanted to scratch the itch of training in his own right.

“The best thing Murray said to me was, ‘if you go, you’re on your own’,” Bjorn says. “At the time, we had a big blow up and I was highly upset. But it was the best thing he ever did.

“It meant I had to come here and I had to work hard, I had to get clients and be aggressive. No doubt I upset a lot of people at that time, but you had to do it to survive.”

Thirteen years on, and he’s not only survived, but has morphed into not only one of the most popular trainers in Australia, but staking a claim to be one of the best, with an emerging band of horses trying to join the likes of Music Magnate, Samadoubt, Arapaho, Ozzmosis, Stefi Magnetica and Overpass as Group 1 winners.

On a damp day at Warwick Farm, Baker walks through his barn relaying rapid rundowns of each horse. He gushes about the appearance of some, acknowledges the faults of others. There are workers beavering away to install new rubber flooring in his barns at considerable expense, and Baker stops momentarily to adjust a sign on a stable door which is slightly askew. He wants every last detail to be in place.

“I think people don’t realise there’s so much hard work that goes into it,” he says. “It’s taken years to build up the clients, to build up the infrastructure, and I think I’ve got the most modern, safest and cleanest stables in Sydney racing. Of that, I’m confident.

“I also do a lot of self reflection and see what works. I’m big into how my horses look. If they look healthy and are healthy and are in the right races and parade well on the day, I think they’ll run well.

“Sydney racing can be like a game of poker sometimes. You’ve got to get your tactics right and you’ve got to do plenty of thought.”

Numbers-wise, Baker doesn’t have a strong hand when it comes to competing with the so-called mega stables of Chris Waller or Ciaron Maher, but what he lacks in size he more than makes up for in attention to detail and his unique social media cut-through. 

“I do think at the moment with the way racing is, you have to look at a free market, and it comes down to what people want and what they’re happy with,” Baker says. “Some of the bigger stables have been amazingly successful, in particular winning the big races that count. So from that they get investment and they’re hard to beat. They have multiple horses in races and if the client is happy with that, so be it. I know personally from my experience as a punter and as an owner before I became a horse trainer, I prefer to be with the stable that possibly has a better strike rate than lots of numbers in each race.”

Imminently, Baker will become an Australian citizen, even though the country has long adopted him as a central figure to its horse racing scene. You can be sure Andrea’s camera will be there to catch that, too.

And by the time he returns to the races on Saturday, be ready for those famous reactions to light up social media if one of his horses wins.

“I think at times, people take training for granted,” he says. “There’s going to be highs and lows, it’s pretty much a rollercoaster ride. At the end of the day, we’re in the entertainment industry. We’ve got to have fun. Don’t get me wrong it’s not all fun, but you can let your hair down and try to make the most of it.” ∎

Kanta Taguchi

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