Gai Waterhouse has trained the winners of more than 100 Group One races in Australia and was the first Australian woman to saddle the winner of the Melbourne Cup. Her first and, so far, only attempt to win a race at Royal Ascot, however, was a long way from being an unqualified success.
The horse concerned was called Bentley Biscuit, an experienced Group One-winning six-year-old sprinter who started at a single-figure price for the King’s Stand Stakes in 2007. Bentley Biscuit took the journey from Australia in his stride, remained composed in the preliminaries and slid into a stall near the stands’ rail without any fuss. Then the stalls opened, and while his 19 opponents accelerated in one direction, Bentley Biscuit set off in quite another.
The memory, clearly, remains a little tender for his trainer. “It drove me mad,” Waterhouse said this week. “We had barrier one and Nash [Rawiller, the jockey] did Pythagoras’s theory.” She points along an imagined hypotenuse. “He went like that, over there. Everything else is charging forward and he’s going across the track. He just lost the plot.”
Bentley Biscuit’s trainer, it seems, was as surprised as anyone by what happened, but then, a last-of-20 finish is a considerable rarity for a runner from the Waterhouse stable. It is the family way, Waterhouse having inherited her licence from her father Tommy J Smith, a legend of Australian racing not just by common consent, but official sanction too. An inductee into Australian racing’s Hall of Fame in 2001 – his daughter joined him six years later – Smith, who died in 1998, was elevated to Legend status in 2012.
Smith named his main stable Tulloch Lodge after the remarkable Tulloch, who managed to win two of Australia’s biggest races, the Caulfield Cup and Cox Plate, in 1957 and 1960 respectively despite a two-year gap in his career battling a near-fatal virus. Waterhouse took over both the licence and the name in 1994, and has been adding to the long list of major winners to emerge from Tulloch Lodge ever since.
She is a near-annual visitor to Royal Ascot as a spectator too, and acquired a share in Cafe Society, who ran in her name to finish third in the Wolferton Handicap, at an eve-of-meeting bloodstock sale in London 12 months ago.
But Wandjina, Waterhouse’s runner in the Group One Diamond Jubilee Stakes next Saturday, is different, a genuine Australian export whose appearance at the Royal meeting is the culmination of a long-term plan.
“I’ve been many times to Ascot, maybe 30 or 35 times, but this is only my second time with a horse,” Waterhouse says. “At home, I train exclusively at Flemington and Randwick [racecourses] and basically on the dirt. I don’t use grass a great deal as I like a consistent surface. That’s all I’ve got basically so to come here [to Newmarket, where Wandjina is stabled] where there’s such a variety in tracks and distance and undulations, and the type of track to work on, it’s just a feast.
“And it’s very much a challenge. A race like this one hasn’t been crossed off the list and I’d very much love to do it.”
When Bentley Biscuit finished last in 2007, there were three more Australian-trained horses in the field – Miss Andretti, Magnus and Takeover Target – that finished first, second and fourth. Takeover Target had won the race the previous year, and Waterhouse was soon in touch with Joe Janiak, the former taxi driver who trained the gelding, in search of advice.
“I rang up Joe,” she says, “and I said to him, how can the champion trainer finish last and the cab driver win the race? I wanted some tips and he said, ‘keep them fresh Gai,’ and I said ‘fine’.”
I don’t think it’s got any easier, they’re hard races to win and very competitive, but I’ve got a nice colt who’s pretty sharp and he’ll certainly give it a good shake. I’ve kept him very fresh and I think that will be in his favour.”
Bentley Biscuit won a Group One at home in Australia barely a month before he lined up at Royal Ascot, but Wandjina, the winner of the Australian Guineas at Flemington in March, has not been to the track since mid-April, when he was nosed out of first place in a Group One at Randwick.
Most of Wandjina’s victories have come at seven furlongs or a mile, whereas the Diamond Jubilee Stakes will be a fiercely run sprint over six. The trip is not a significant concern for his trainer, however, and Wandjina’s undoubted quality, as well as Waterhouse’s reputation, will ensure that he starts among the favourites next week.
“He’s very relaxed and mature and he’s coped with it all very professionally,” Waterhouse said. “The [uphill] finish will just carry him through.
“I think he’s the best three-year-old in Australia at 1400m [seven furlongs] and a mile. We wanted to expose him to the northern hemisphere as he will be going to stud in August of this year.
“It would be really special to win a race here as it is a different league. It’s on the world stage and it’s the centre of racing and has been for centuries. There’s nowhere else like it in the world.”
Victory for Wandjina would also add to the Tulloch Lodge legend back at home, where the sporting public loves nothing more than to see domestic excellence endorsed on an international stage. The racing public are definitely behind us, and it also gives exposure to people who may not know that Ascot’s on, which I think is very important,” Waterhouse said.
“I try to wave the flag as best I can for racing, it’s important with so many other industries eating into our participants and players, which means it’s sometimes very hard to get exposure. I’m always out there trying to push it forward. We came here once before and we didn’t succeed, so we’re coming back to try to succeed.”
