Lonhro filly off to Gai

GAI TO DEVELOP FILLY BY LONHRO

Bruce Slade from Round Table Racing has identified a major opportunity for prospective owners with 77 stakes races held in Australia every season worth $20m in prize-money for three-year-olds at 1600m and beyond.

The European breeding season places thoroughbreds bred in that hemisphere at a disadvantage due to the age difference. Slade, deliberately targeted thoroughbreds he believed would develop in their classic season to give owners an opportunity to focus in on this rich prizemoney.

This filly is one of those yearlings Slade selected earlier this year from the Magic Millions sales ring by champion sire, Lonhro out of the stakes winning, Spectrolite.

The brown fillies sire, Lonhro was possessed with a wonderful turn-of-foot and was a group winner at two, three, four and five. Known fondly as the 'Black Flash' Lonhro, won the Group 1 VRC Australian Cup, L.K.S. Mackinnon Stakes, AJC Queen Elizabeth Stakes, George Main Stakes, Chipping Norton Stakes, STC George Ryder Stakes, MRC C.F. Orr Stakes and for good measure two renewals of the Caulfield Stakes.

Lonhro was crowned Australia's Horse of the Year after his deeds on the track in the 2003-04 season, and that achievement was followed up with the World Champion Middle Distance Horse of 2004 with a rating of 123 by the International Horse Racing Federation.

As a sire, Lonhro has 43 stakes winners on his statistics record and among them is Pierro (ex Miss Right Note) a colt trained by Gai.

NOT ENOUGH? The dam of this filly, Spectrolite revealed ability as a two-year-old winning the Listed VRC Ottawa Stakes on debut by half-a-length. Spectrolite is out of the Rory's Jester mare, Canicula a winner of three races and descends from a family that has produced the quality galloper Diamond Benny (by Hit It Benny), a winner of 15-races that included the Group 3 STC Frederick Clissold Handicap.

The fillies career and syndicate will be managed by Bruce Slade.

Another racing season and another landmark in the stellar training career of Gai Waterhouse.

In her 21st year at the helm of Australia’s greatest ever racing stable, Tulloch Lodge, Waterhouse trained her first Melbourne Cup winner, Fiorente, a galloper whose credentials establish him as one of the best of the thousands of horses she has handled.

During the 2013-2014 season Fiorente contributed four of the 167-1/2 wins around Australia by Waterhouse-trained horses. He also contributed around $4.5m of the $18.8 million won by her runners during the year. That figure put her in second place, behind only Chris Waller, on the national prizemoney table.

It also continued the cavalcade of success that makes her one of the world’s most successful racehorse trainers.

From the time she was granted a trainers’ licence in January, 1992, Waterhouse has been setting the standard for success. Her first winner was Gifted Poet at Hawkesbury in March, 1992, her first Group One win was delivered by Te Akau Nick in the same year and the first of seven Sydney trainers’ premierships came in only her third full season.

Waterhouse has trained an average of more than 100 winners a year from the time began and in the 2002-2003 racing season she led in 156 winners in Sydney, a record that matched that of her father, T. J. Smith.

As well as giving her a breakthrough success in the nation’s greatest race, Fiorente’s Cup win placed Waterhouse alongside Bart Cummings as the only trainer to lead in the winners of both the Melbourne Cup and Golden Slipper in the same year. Overreach’s success in the 2013 Slipper was her fifth in the world’s premier juvenile event, a race in which she is the only trainer to have prepared the first three placegetters, a feat achieved in 2001 with Ha Ha, Excellerator and Red Hanigan. Waterhouse has also won seven Doncaster Handicaps, four of them in succession.

She has twice trained 11 Group One winners in a season, a record for an Australian trainer. Waterhouse added yet another string to her bow in the season past with her first American runner, Pornichet in the Group One Belmont Derby in New York.

As impressive as the Waterhouse record is at the upper level, her ability to get returns for owners across the board is an equally significant tribute, typified on Cup day itself when along with her breakthrough Melbourne Cup success, she won a three-year-old maiden at Kembla Grange.

And all the signs are there that 2014-15 will be another exceptional year for a trainer who is a lot more than merely the face of Australian racing.