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True To His Roots, Champion Trainer Justin Snaith Is Committed To The Cause

South African racing is in a healthier spot than it has been for decades and Snaith is fully engaged with helping the sport catch up on its lost years.

True To His Roots, Champion Trainer Justin Snaith Is Committed To The Cause

South African racing is in a healthier spot than it has been for decades and Snaith is fully engaged with helping the sport catch up on its lost years.

IT’S A BIG WEEK in Cape Town and Justin Snaith, South Africa’s champion trainer, sounds as though he’s relishing what lies ahead. Thursday brings the Cape Racing Sales’ Summer Sale and then into Saturday for the Cape Town Met meeting itself: 12 races, three of them Group 1 features, three Group 3s and a couple of Listed races among them.

He’ll have 23 runners that day to keep him busy – including a pair of major chances in the Group 1s – and with his all-action, hands-on drive, one suspects that’s the way he likes it.     

“It’s a big one, it’s a very important day, it’s one of the three biggest events on our calendar for the entire season in South Africa, and especially as it’s my home town, so for me it’s a big thing,” he tells Idol Horse.

Snaith was born in Muizenberg overlooking Cape Town’s stunning False Bay, where his father Chris Snaith trained horses on the beach, and spent much of his childhood close by in Marina da Gama. He and his brother Jonathan took over the running of the family stable at nearby Philippi in 2000 from their father, who remained part of the operation, with Justin’s name on the trainer’s licence and Jonathan steering the Snaith Racing business. Snaith’s many successes since then include three wins in the family’s hometown feature, the Cape Town Met.

Justin Snaith leading beach work aboard Jet Dark
JUSTIN SNAITH, JET DARK / Muizenberg Beach // 2023 /// Photo By Candiese Lenferna

Met Day is nowadays a Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) World Pool event, which brings added global exposure as well as lucrative returns to Cape Racing, but the positive vibe from Snaith – one can feel the local pride – is born of more than just that one, albeit sizable, fillip to his home scene. It’s that things generally are better in South African racing than they have been in a long while.

If that wasn’t the case, perhaps Snaith would not even be on-track at Kenilworth to saddle his five in the big one, or the classy filly Double Grand Slam in the G1 Majorca Stakes. After all, his triumphs at home, numbering multiple national titles, Horse of the Year awards with Do It Again and Oh Susanna, and more than 60 Group 1 wins, have brought suitors.

He has worked overseas before and rode David Hayes’s 1994 G1 Melbourne Cup winner Jeune in trackwork during his time as a young man in Australia. Since then he has at times been offered and turned down work in the Middle East and has long been on the HKJC radar, but unlike other South African champion trainers, David Ferraris and Tony Millard, and a host of jockeys including the great Douglas Whyte, he has never made the move to Hong Kong.  

“I have been in contact with the Hong Kong Jockey Club a few times,” Snaith says. “When there’s a job opportunity they do contact me, which I’m very thankful for, and I’m very taken aback that they think of me.

“The problem is, when I would have gone there wasn’t an opening and now I’ve got a young family here in South Africa, so it’s made it hard for me to make a move because I’m thinking of my family. Also, I can tell you that there are very few cities in the world at the moment that are as beautiful as Cape Town, so it does make it a little bit more difficult.

“But I’m always honoured when the Hong Kong Jockey Club contacts me and if ever in my life I feel that I can move …,” he leaves that thought hanging for half a second then continues. “It’s a big commitment to move your whole family, and at the moment I am pretty focused on trying to help our racing here get to a level that is competitive internationally. I’m quite committed to helping racing here in South Africa.”

Trainer Justin Snaith
JUSTIN SNAITH / Photo by Candiese Lenferna

Horse racing in South Africa has enjoyed an upturn in fortunes in recent times, and there are positive signs in the country at large, too. South Africa has significant wealth inequality and saw out 2024 with a high unemployment rate of about 33 per cent, but there bright spots as well: a new government in June 2024 seems to have brought a new economic plan and some hope; the South African economy has at least recovered to pre-Covid pandemic levels; the electricity supply, subject to blackouts since 2007, has stabilised; and inflation dropped from above five percent in early 2024 to a four-year low of 2.8 percent in November as fuel and food prices eased a little.

On the racing front, Cape Racing has benefitted from the involvement of betting giant Hollywoodbets, which stepped in and effectively saved Snaith’s home track, Kenilworth Racecourse, buying it outright in a deal worth R330 million (approx. US$17.8 million) in July 2022. That purchase was given the green light by the Competition Commission the following April, enabling a significant injection of funds into projects including facilities upgrades.

Prize money has improved, and not only in Cape Racing: the recent G1 King’s Plate, sponsored by Cape wine brand L’Ormarins was worth R3 million (approx. US$160,000) compared to R2 million (approx. US$107,000) in 2024, and the G1 Cape Town Met is worth a record R5 million (approx. US$268,000) this time around; this follows the G1 Summer Cup at Turffontein, Johannesburg, in November, sponsored by another South African betting giant, Betway, which became South Africa’s richest race with a prize pool of R6 million (approx. US$321,000).

Increased prize money is one thing, but added to that is a feeling that the industry is on something of an even keel when it comes to leadership and direction, even if South African racing still has some catching up to do after years of struggle.

Notable owners and breeders with huge wealth and international business know-how have stepped up to help move racing forward, like Mary Slack, the daughter of the late De Beers Chairman Harry Oppenheimer and owner of Wilgerbosdrift Stud; Gaynor Rupert of Drakenstein Stud, wife of luxury goods billionaire Johann Rupert who owns L’Ormarins and whose Richemont is the parent company to Cartier, Van Cleef and Arpels, and Buccelatti; and then there’s Owen Heffer of Hollywoodbets and its spin-off Hollywood Racing syndicate. 

“That’s the reason why I stayed,” Snaith says. “There was a point where our racing was being run by incompetent people and that’s when I was in contact with Hong Kong and very close to leaving. One of my clients has come to the party and has helped to refund and reinvent our racing, and going forward I think you’ll see that South African racing will pop up everywhere and there’ll be more positive feedback coming in because of the effort that’s been made.

“But we’ve lost 15 years, I’d say. I know Australian racing, and we lost 15 years to Australian racing and now it feels like 30 years. So, I think we’ve really got a lot to catch up on and it’ll be difficult but everyone’s committed and we’re looking forward to what will hopefully be some exciting times.

“I think there’s a lot of positives coming out of South Africa at the moment which certainly helps; our country is in a good space at the moment, which benefits our racing.”

Ipi Tombe claims the 2003 Dubai Duty Free
IPI TOMBE, KEVIN SHEA / G1 Dubai Duty Free // Nad Al Sheba /// 2003 //// Photo by Trevor Jones / Popperfoto

Another benefit is the change in March 2024 that lifted a 13-year ban on South African horses entering the European Union (EU) due to fears over African Horse Sickness. That had reduced investment, stymied the bloodstock industry and brought a halt to South African horses heading offshore to contest major races. The days of Ipi Tombe and J J The Jet Plane seem far distant.

But the efforts of Isivunguvungu and Beach Bomb at the 2024 Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar showed that South African horses could travel and could compete again at the top, yet that pair still had to go through a full two months of quarantine after arriving in the United States. And that was after 14 days at the Kenilworth quarantine centre: better than 60 days in Mauritius, for sure, but still not a simple excursion.

“Our South African horses ran at the Breeders’ Cup raceday and they’re not some of the best horses we’ve exported. I wouldn’t even put them in the top 10 of the horses exported out of South Africa, yet I thought they ran incredible races in the Breeders’ Cup,” Snaith says.

“That has given South Africa a lot of confidence going forward. Hence there are some horses being bought now that are a step up on that, for the next Breeders’ Cup.”

Snaith would like to compete internationally but he is not yet jumping to put his horses on planes, and Dubai, 20 years ago a lucrative patch for South African trainers such as Mike de Kock and a natural place to look to compete, is still not easy to get to, Snaith says.  

“It seems that when a shipment is put together, a trip to the States seems easier than me going to Dubai, those sorts of trips are still near-impossible. The easiest export at the moment seems to be to go and race in America,” he says.

“For a lot of my clients, though, America’s not really on the radar but if that’s where you want to go then that’s certainly an option.”

Snaith leading Rapidash under jockey Grant van Niekerk
RAPIDASH, JUSTIN SNAITH, GRANT VAN NIEKERK, owner NICK JONSSON / Cape Racing Gold Rush // Kenilworth /// 2024 //// Candiese Lenferna

Snaith is still young of mind, mode, and outlook, but nevertheless he is a mid-career professional with half a century of life experience behind him, yet much of his career has been closed off, restricted to his own patch. That is not lost on him.

“It has sometimes been a half a laugh and a half of disappointment that I was born in possibly the only country in the world that can’t export a horse correctly,” he says. “I find it quite humorous that of all the places in the world I could have been born, I was born in a country that we just are cut off a little bit from the rest of the world.

“But when we do get out there, we always compete a little bit above what the expectation is, and for me,” he adds, “we’ve always walked away being proudly South African because we’ve gone up against everything.”

Proudly South African and proudly Cape Town, that’s how Snaith comes across, and if this new period of World Pool and Hollywoodbets et al can take its racing to the world, then perhaps South Africa’s champion trainer will get his chance to show the world what he can do, without ever leaving home ∎

David Morgan is Chief Journalist at Idol Horse. As a sports mad young lad in County Durham, England, horse racing hooked him at age 10. He has a keen knowledge of Hong Kong and Japanese racing after nine years as senior racing writer and racing editor at the Hong Kong Jockey Club. David has also worked in Dubai and spent several years at the Racenews agency in London. His credits include among others Racing Post, ANZ Bloodstock News, International Thoroughbred, TDN, and Asian Racing Report.

View all articles by David Morgan.

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