Of all the places you could find Chris Waller on a racetrack, a red carpet outside the room for winning owners is a pretty good bet. There’s a neat strip rolled out in front of the doorway. He edges to within a few steps of Via Sistina’s winning connections, celebrating the mare’s astonishing 10th G1 win at a race meeting her trainer argued shouldn’t have gone ahead, and then stops. He has something he’s getting off his chest to Idol Horse.
“I’m not whinging, I’m trying to do the best for racing,” Waller says. “What Peter V’landys and his board have done for racing in NSW, which has flowed on to (the rest of) Australia, is exceptional. It’s second to none. He’s the greatest…”
You almost feel like there’s a but coming.
“But he’s too good,” Waller continues. “You can’t sustain the pressure they want us to sustain with the good horses racing at the start of August and still being there at the end of the carnival. He wants to have the best horses racing all the time, but we need some help with the tracks.”
Such is his dominance in his adopted hometown, Waller is a central figure at any Sydney race meeting. But for this one at Royal Randwick, it feels like he is the only one.
It started just after 7am when Australia’s champion G1 trainer did an interview with Sky Sports Radio before Winx Stakes day. The conversation is usually cordial, a trainer gives a little bit of insight into their runners later in the day, a mostly vanilla exchange. From the moment he was introduced, Waller was on a mission.
He started off by saying he didn’t think the meeting should proceed on Saturday because of the torrential rain which had dumped on Sydney – more than 200mm on the track alone in a week. The card was barely salvaged. He then laid into the “roulette” nature of Australian horse racing, when there’s always another race about to be run.
It was a pivotal day for his stable. He was due to roll out Australian Horse of the Year Via Sistina, Australian Derby heroine Aeliana, Group 1 winner Fangirl and the unbeaten Autumn Glow for their first runs of their spring campaigns. With finally some good weather scheduled for Sydney, he wanted the races to be postponed 24 hours, ideally 48. It would bring a better surface.
But that creates a problem for the industry bean counters, because the stay-at-home punting dollar in Australia is strong on a Saturday and not so much every other day of the week. No matter which way you slice it, a feature race meeting held away from Saturday is a financial dead zone.
On top of that, it’s an open secret more turnover is generated from race meetings in Sydney at Royal Randwick and Rosehill than decaying venues such as Warwick Farm and Canterbury, and that gambling peak is crucial to sustaining NSW’s astronomical prize money levels. Warwick Farm and Canterbury didn’t hold a single Sydney Saturday meeting throughout winter. Waller can’t understand why.
“Wagering will say people don’t bet at Warwick Farm, Canterbury and the Kensington track like they do (at Royal Randwick), but we’ve got to factor that into our budgets,” he says. “We’ve got to say, ‘we’re taking a hit in July’. We’ve got to learn to use these tracks and complement our spring.”
Even if it means his horses wouldn’t have been running for A$1 million in the Winx Stakes?
“I wouldn’t give two hoots,” Waller says. “Those horses weren’t running because of the money, they were running because it’s a Group 1 and prestige.”
V’landys has made it his life mission to line the pockets of NSW’s best trainers, jockeys and owners with as much money as he can. He’s been uber successful doing it.
But when the man who has arguably benefited from it more than anyone else is agitating for investment elsewhere, and openly conceding he would be happy to race for less, how much is too much? What about the A$10 million Golden Eagle?
“My best horses would be running in the Golden Eagle for $5 million,” Waller says. “But it’s a great international drawcard. I don’t care where it’s run, but it needs to be run on the best surface possible.”
It doesn’t seem to matter what surface, Via Sistina just seems to win. Waller admitted to being “tense and nervous” with the race on a Heavy 10 surface – the worst official rating for Australian tracks – and even walked Royal Randwick on Friday. He didn’t even do that when Winx was in her pomp. On Saturday morning, he kept all his horses in the G1 bar Fangirl, who won the race two years ago. Her wheels spin whenever it’s wet. She was off to Melbourne by night’s end.
“I’ve put three months into today,” Waller shrugs. “She was last year’s favourite and was scratched from the race. She’s a sharper horse than Via Sistina over 1400 (metres). I’ve had the Inghams pumped up for 90 days to say, ‘this is where we’re resuming’. It’s heartbreaking.
“But the heavy track horses deserve their chance as well. I get that. I’ve got more heavy track horses than anyone. I’ve got more slow horses than anybody. I’m lucky to have some good horses too. You don’t take risks with them, or any horses.
“I would have loved to have run on Monday, but you’ve got to factor in budgets. Do you race for 70 per cent of the money?”
Contacted by Idol Horse, V’landys maintained Waller “is entitled to his views”.
Waller wasn’t the only one interested in the state of the track. The Hong Kong Jockey Club was represented in the stands, two months before Ka Ying Rising is due to start a raging-hot favourite in the A$20 million The Everest. Maybe only a sodden and tired track can bring him undone.
By the time Waller walked the track again before the Winx Stakes he knew it was wet but safe, hailing the track staff as having done “an amazing job”.
Says Autumn Glow’s owner-breeder John Messara after her win in the Toy Show: “For the amount of rain they’ve had here, they’ve done an outstanding job to get it to this stage. I was thinking it was a possibility (the meeting would be delayed), but these feature days are better run on the weekend.”
Logic should have said if Via Sistina was to be vulnerable, the Winx Stakes should have been it. First-up, at a distance short of her best, on a wet track she’s never consistently excelled on etc.
But in the paddock, she shimmied past onlookers, her coat gleaming. Thirty-five minutes before was Autumn Glow, this was the winter glow. Another stablemate and rival Aeliana walked fresh, a little woolly, the type of wait-for-later parade. It might have been a surprise when she loomed up as a shadow on Via Sistina and James McDonald’s inside in the surge to the finish, but Via Sistina jumped into gear because of the shadow and held on. It was the first time an eight-year-old mare had won a Group 1 race in Australia for 80 years.
“Every time I got closer, it just kept finding,” Aeliana’s jockey Jason Collett said. “That’s what good horses do.”
Watching the presentation was to observe how a Kiwi who arrived in Australia with a maxed-out credit card and one horse has a complete stranglehold on the city. In a race named after his best horse, Winx’s owners (who also had Lindermann run 10th on Saturday) presented the trophy to Via Sistina’s Yulong connections, another of Waller’s major owners, as his biggest syndicator, Star Thoroughbreds, who race Aeliana, watched on.
Waller finished the day only narrowly missing out on training every winner of the quadrella when his horses finished second, third, fifth and sixth in the last race of a day he was sceptical about going ahead. His influence is everywhere.
Even more so on a red carpet usually reserved for winners. He never quite makes it into the owners’ room, spying the time and a rush to give instructions to his jockey in the next race. Regardless, he’d made his point on and off the track.
Now, who is going to listen? ∎
