Waller weekly news - Chris Waller Racing

Waller weekly news
18 april, 2014
Our Voodoo Prince, picture Darryl Sherer.
After the excitement surrounding The Championships, you can’t quite ignore that slight twinge, reminiscent of the post-Christmas
blues. It would therefore be fair to say that they certainly lived up to their hype being thoroughly enjoyed by the CWR team. Raffles
Racing and Waikato Stud’s Sacred Falls provided the stable’s highlight on the event’s last day with his fantastic second in the $4
million Queen Elizabeth Stakes. Meanwhile at Caulfield, Our Voodoo Prince continued to live up to his regal breeding having now
compiled a winning hat-trick in Australia. Improving in leaps and bounds with each start, his win on Saturday was full of merit after
a torrid trip up the Caulfield straight - the Caulfield Cup is being touted as his when he resumes in the spring.
Also having a successful week was CWR owner Mr CC Lai who celebrated two winners with the stable. Both are promising up and
comers with Lucky Happy saluting at Wyong and the exciting Northern Meteor colt Idyllic Scenery at Canterbury.
Leaving little time for the post-Championships blues to linger, the stable has been flat to the boards with plenty of runners stepping
out over the last week as Anzac Day and Easter holiday race-days. This is set to continue as we spread our wings with racing teams
heading to Queensland and England in the coming weeks. We wish everyone a safe and enjoyable long weekend with plenty of luck!
For Chris’s thoughts on our runners watch this week’s video preview and
for a full list of horses entered to race in the coming days visit www.cwallerracing.com
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
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WINNERS
•
CHRIS WALLER – THE SILENT ACHIEVER
•
CHARLIE’S CORNER
•
GETTING TO KNOW THE TEAM – VOLKAN ULUDAG, PHOTOS & MORE
CHRIS WALLER RACING – WINNERS THIS WEEK
OUR VOODOO PRINCE
5YO G Kingmambo – Ouija Board (Cape Cross)
Caulfield, Group 3 Le Pine Funerals Easter Cup
(2000m) 0.8L.
Encountering a multitude of traffic jams in the straight,
Our Voodoo Prince did a brilliant job to remain
balanced and then pick up his momentum to win his
first black-type race and his third victory in Australia.
He’s now earned almost $350,000 for his connections
and certainly deserved the big pat between the ears he
was given by jockey James Winks as they crossed the
line.
He has headed for a well-earned spell at Boynton Park
before we set some loftier targets in the Spring.
IDYLLIC SCENERY
2YO G Northern Meteor – Secret Society (Dodge).
Canterbury, ATC Heritage Society Maiden
(1250m) 0.2L.
Given the perfect ride by Hugh Bowman, Idyllic
Scenery showed good natural improvement since his
debut run to break his maiden at Canterbury yesterday.
He was a $140,000 purchase from Karaka and by all
accounts he looks to be a very exciting prospect for the
stable. Interestingly, another son of Northern Meteor,
namely Zoustar, kicked off his racing career in a similar
race at Canterbury this time last year!
Depending on how he comes through the race, he may
start in 10 days time at Hawkesbury over 1300m.
STAR HORSE OF THE WEEK
BIG BROWN – MAGIC MUSIC (LOOSEN UP) FILLY.
Star’s horse of the week is the Big Brown filly from the speedy 12-time
winning mare Magic Music. Setting a Moonee Valley track record, Magic
Music’s victories were fetched over distances up to 1200m including the
Group 2 Schweppes Stakes while she also placed at Group 1 level twice.
Chris’s comments “She’s a beautiful filly with a fluid action and good size
and scope. One we expect to be up and running early”
More details:
http://www.starthoroughbreds.com.au/listings/
detail.asp?iNews=668&iType=42
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CHRIS WALLER – THE SILENT ACHIEVER
Chief Sports Writer for the Sydney Morning Herald, Andrew Webster, managed to pin Chris down during The
Championships for an interview before he put together this interesting and insightful piece...
“He’s not an emotional person to be honest,”
offers Stephanie Waller. “The only time I see
him cry is when the horse has won. He’s
funny like that. What did you mention?
Rangi?”
Well, yes.
When you come from nothing, and never
had nothing, the only thing that digs you out
of the hole is hard work.
On this sweaty Wednesday midweek
meeting at a near-vacant Royal Randwick, as
we sit beneath the owners' pavilion, the
country’s leading trainer is wrestling with
the lump in his throat.
Chris Waller seemingly has the most capricious sport of all at his command - for now at least - but when it comes to explaining his
place in it, and his connection with some of his horses, and where he has come from, he has very little control.
Rangirangdoo (pictured left), the champion horse that
punched above his weight to win group 1 races before
tragically breaking down and dying during a race at
Doomben last year, is one such reason.
“You’re going to get me again,” Waller says, choking up. “If
you ever saw Phar Lap ... Harry Telford said, ‘He wasn’t
just a horse. He was a mate’. He was the same. Yeah …
Simple as that. He was like a pet.”
The Lump was there last Saturday, on the first day of The
Championships, when four of his horses - Sacred Falls, Royal
Descent, Weary and Hawkspur - dominated the Doncaster
Mile.
It’s in these moments, when the TV cameras are thrust
before him, that Waller struggles to keep it together.
“I wasn’t too bad,” he recalls of the minute after the Doncaster devastation, before talking about being emotional makes him
emotional. “The Channel Seven one was … I try not to think about it… I don’t know. I’m getting emotional now.”
Why, Chris?
“It’s because I did it so tough in the early days. These horses aren’t the important horses. It was the Party Belles (his first winner)
through the tough times… And nowadays it’s special … Yeah.”
To understand how tough Waller did it, you need to cross the ditch, to the north island of New Zealand, go about an hour or so
north of Wellington and come down in Foxton, a small horseracing town of about 3000 people.
Waller, the son of a dairy farmer, sees the pretty girl he knows from high school singing the national anthem at the racetrack.
When he and Steph start dating, she knows straight away that her boyfriend will make it. She just didn’t know by how much.
“I always knew - always knew he’d succeed,” offers Steph, his wife of nine years and mother of his two small children. “His work
ethic, even when we were dating… We’d go out and there was never going to be a missed day of work. Never a sick day. I was a
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CHRIS WALLER RACING
close second. Work was his priority. He was so driven and knew what he wanted to do. But to this level? Nobody could’ve
predicted that.”
Every rung Waller has climbed in the past 20 years has been a new benchmark set.
When he was working as a strapper in Sydney for six weeks stints during the early 1990s, living in the Doncaster Hotel in
Kensington, he “thought I had made it”. When he had his first
winner with Party Belle, and then the former Sydney Turf Club
offered him 20 boxes at Rosehill, he “thought I had made it again”.
In reality, he and Steph were dancing the poverty line.
They slept on the floor at friends' places until they found a cheap
rental they couldn’t fill with furniture, and when they did it was
second-hand stuff. They didn’t have a car for their first three years
in Sydney.
“I’d get a ride to Newcastle in the horse truck, or with a jockey or
other trainer,” Waller explains. “I didn’t know any better.”
In those early years, Steph’s modelling work in Japan would cover
the rent.
“She certainly contributed more than I did in the early days,” he
says. “All I was doing was paying the wages. I couldn’t get an
overdraft, I couldn’t borrow any money, so I had to make every
week pay. I had to work long hours for the sake of having less
staff.”
Says Steph: “We weren’t living off bread and butter, but we were
living from rent to rent, week to week.”
When you come from nothing, and never had nothing, the only
thing that digs you out of the hole is hard work. So Waller did the work of two or three staffers, because of the simple fact he
couldn’t afford to hire anyone else.
Then, after a few years, as he started to prepare more winners and more owners became interested, the equine influenza epidemic
struck. It levelled racing, but almost took Waller out.
“How will we get through this?” he thought. “We’ve just got on our feet.”
That was 2007. For Waller, it could’ve gone either
way. Then a message arrived on his mobile phone,
and it changed everything.
It was Bob Ingham, the biggest owner-breeder in
the country, who had just sold his entire racing
empire to Sheikh Mohammed's Darley operation
for $500,000.
“I get emotional about that,” says Waller, recalling
the moment. “We hadn’t trained a group 1 winner.
I get this message on my phone: ‘Please phone Bob
Ingham’. I knew they were going to get a new
trainer, but I didn’t think I would be selected… He
said, ‘We’d like to buy some horses and have some
fun’.”
The other breakthrough was Triple Honour
(pictured right), who won the Doncaster six years
ago after Waller had considered sending him out to the paddock for good.
“That gave me the confidence to keep going. That I could train.”
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Could train?
He has won the past three Sydney trainers' premierships, eclipsing Gai Waterhouse, which is never easily achieved on any count. He
has 120 horses in work. He could snatch the Melbourne premiership, too.
“She’s always been there to help, more so outside of racing,” Waller says of Waterhouse. “Making sure I have family time and have a
break through the year. She’s always there if I need some advice.”
In January, Waterhouse’s leading syndication arm - Star Thoroughbreds, headed by Denise Martin - sensationally left after 20 years
and joined Waller.
“With Denise and the Star coming over, she (Waterhouse) has never said a bad word to me. She knows I didn’t approach Denise. A
lot of trainers would think I do approach owners; I’ve never pinched a horse. We’ve been given a lot of horses.”
Waller raises the toughest question in your notepad on this afternoon before you do - the belief, from some in the industry, that
Waller lobbies owners to prepare their horses. Steal them, in other words.
“I don’t remember ringing an owner up and saying, ‘I want to train your horse’,” he insists. “Sure, there might be roundabout ways
of saying I am available. But I go to bed at night knowing I’ve done the right thing every day of my life.”
Has anyone ever accused him of doing it?
“Not to my face. Never, ever. If it has been, there has been no fact to it.”
Success also attracts jealousy. I ask him to describe his relationship with Team Hawkes, whom the Inghams parted ways with when
they sold out to Darley.
“I choose not to think too much into it,” Waller says. “The Hawkes family has been there and done it, so it’s hard for them to see
that I am training for their big client and having a fair amount of success. They’ll come up to me and congratulate me after the races,
like they did after the Doncaster on Saturday. They know what I am going through: they’ve been there and done it. John’s been
there and done it. And I get a bit of advice from him now and then.”
During the past few weeks, it's been interesting to watch Waller from close range. For most races, he watches the race inside, on
the TV screen. He hates a crowd.
"You get paranoid that people are thinking, 'Oh, I hope Waller gets beat'," he says. "We were at Rosehill 18 months ago. We’d
won a race every meeting for almost a year. It was 24 meetings in a row. Then we lost, and I was just paranoid of everyone
watching me when the races were on.
"If I have a fear, it’s about getting behind in your work and not enjoying it. I very rarely drink, because I am paranoid about not
being right on the ball when that alarm goes off. I spring out of bed every morning, and every Saturday night I’ll have a wine or two.
Fear of failure and getting behind in work is what my fears are.
"When we first won the premiership, I thought, 'if I can win this premiership, I don’t have to prove anything to anyone'. And then
we did do it, but straight away everything changed. It was the pressure to maintain it. Media, owners, and just the public
perception, probably exaggerated by me being over-conscious about what people think and say. So straight away, I was there to
think we had to do it again."
Having nailed the Doncaster last Saturday with Sacred
Falls (pictured right) the winner, he will try to do it
again over three of the four group 1s this Saturday including the $4 million Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
Should he clean up, you can expect Chris Waller to
wrestle with the lump in his throat again. It's in that
small moment, when he's not working for a chance, he
can think about what he's done.
"He works so hard, he doesn’t have time to reflect,"
says Steph. "When someone like you sits him down and
starts asking him about it, that’s where the emotion
comes from."
CHRIS WALLER RACING
Charlie’s corner
Another of our UK imports, Racing Post Scholarship winner
Charlie Duckworth joined the stable in February. Riding out
in the mornings he also contributes this column to the
newsletter…
With The Championships over and coming up to the last Saturday of the
six week long BMW Sydney Carnival. I’d like to say what a hectic and
mad time it has been with ups and downs throughout but what a
wonderful experience it has been for me. The whole racing scene is so
different out here, I would love to be able to say its better or worse, but
I can’t it is just too different to have a simple yes or no answer. Before
you even start looking into any serious factors such as tracks, racing patterns, and money a huge help is that you have the weather
for it. Leaving an English winter behind and coming here, how can anyone is the whole of Australia be depressed? Waking up near
enough every morning to sunshine is extraordinary you can’t help but smile and be positive. It adds glamour to the racing - even
weekday racing. You don’t have to wrap up in a thousand layers just so you can feel your feet. With that comes a different attitude,
I think on the whole most people here are more optimistic and welcoming and are more willing to risk it for a biscuit than at home.
Sport is just so much bigger over here and the ease to place bets is also a massive help to the racing industry. It doesn’t matter who
you are it seems everyone I’ve met has a team in multiple sports.
Back to racing it really has been a whirlwind for me. There is no such thing as this at home, yes we have Champions day at the end
of the year which is a relatively new concept and it comes too late and/or too close for some of the horses who want to go to
Longchamp in France for the world famous l’Arc de Triomphe or any of the other great races featured on that day. We saw Treve
last year destroying the field and ending up sharing first place with another unbeaten super star in Black Caviar in the Longines
World’s Best Racehorse Rankings. We don’t boast about having $18 million of prize money in just two days racing but what we do
have is Royal Ascot. Royal Ascot is the most wonderful event it is held over five days straight and has races for the best horses in the
world for every age and every trip. The mighty Zoustar has been tempted over there to follow in the footsteps of many top
Australian sprinters such as Black Caviar, Ortensia and Takeover Target. There have been few Australian horses to take on the
pommes over longer distances, with the exception of So You Think who did so well in both hemispheres. Now the event has
captured the imagination of another owner of Chris Waller’s with Sacred Falls. Hopefully, if all goes to plan he will line up for the
Queen Anne which is a straight mile and a testing mile at that.
What I love about the whole racing game is that no matter how much money is involved and how high the stakes are, essentially you
and I are both infatuated by the horses. Every time a horse is born, a dream is created whether it is for the stud where is born or the
owner of the mare or the eventual owner or trainer and even the groom. They all dream about having something to do with that
horse and hope it can end up to be the likes of Sacred Falls who can conquer the Doncaster Mile two years running and then have
the chance to challenge new rivals all over the world including going to England to take on the very best there as well. This is what
we are all in it for. No horse will be
leaving these sunny shores to race for
more money but they will be leaving to
further the dream.
Having the Duke and Duchess of
Cambridge in Australia made me realise
just how special the monarchy is. It is a
huge part of Royal Ascot, so much so
that usually the first bet of the day is
guessing what colour the Queen’s hat
will be. Her Majesty has loved her horses
all her life and was lucky enough to meet
Black Caviar after her narrow victory at
Royal Ascot (pictured right).
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Star Thoroughbreds News - Arecibo
After receiving their initial education at Muskoka Farm, many of the Star
Thoroughbreds babies are having their first looks around Rosehill at the moment and as
Chris said earlier this week “It’s lovely to have such quality, well educated yearlings in
the stables.”
With some of them already fully syndicated, the Star team have, as always, endeavoured
to come up with great names for their horses.
Arecibo (Star Witness x Dane Julia (SAF)) was a Magic Millions purchase which
Denise was keen to secure and interestingly the name relates to the Arecibo
Observatory in Puerto Rico where the observatory’s radio telescope is the world’s
largest single aperture telescope, used in three major areas of research, including radar
astronomy… We are not the only ones clearly looking for their very own stars!
Let’s hope with all of this research that Star’s gorgeous Arecibo is himself a great star on
the racetrack.
To view what yearlings the Star team have available for purchase visit:
www.starthoroughbreds.com.au
GETTING TO KNOW
VOLKAN ULUDAG
Volkan grew up in Istanbul, Turkey and studied horse breeding and business
administration at Istanbul University. He has been in Australia since 2007 where he
began working for Drake Racing in Musswellbrook before joining Chris Waller
Racing. Volkan has now been with the stable for three and a half years. A stable
foreman, Volkan and his team ably look after Barn 4 - a barn full of girls with a few
geldings thrown in the mix to even out the field.
Nickname? Less- Volkano
Best quote? It doesn’t matter how slowly you go, as long as you don’t stop.
Favourite part of the job? Feeding the horses; I love watching them eat and I love
the sound of them.
Favourite horse? Rangirangdoo – He was a real racehorse – a Warhorse.
Best horse ever seen? Black Caviar
Role model? My Mum – she has taught me everything and has supported me with everything I have done.
Favourite food? My food!
Favourite jockey? Hugh Bowman – He is very disciplined and has a great personality.
If you weren’t in racing, what would you have done? I would have been a chef; I love cooking.
If you could invite two people for dinner, who would you invite? Cate Blanchett and Barack Obama.
Event in the world that you would most like to attend? Rio Carnival – a music festival in Brazil.
What would you do with your last $5? I would buy myself a flat white.
Tip for the weekend? Weary.
CHRIS WALLER RACING
Calming Influence and Bruno.
Now’s the Time & Lucy.
Abbasso.
Roll up, roll up for your 40 minute
afternoon walk!!
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Lucky Happy and Ed.
Casiroll.
Lonhro – Woodland Nymph 2yo
Free Happy and Rob.
The Alfonso.