More Than Ready With Round Table

GAI TO POLISH COLT

This colt is by More Than Ready out of the Group 1 BTC Doomben Cup winner, Cinque Cento.

The sire, More Than Ready won seven races during a 16-race start career that included the Grade 1 King’s Bishop Stakes (1400m) at Saratoga. By Southern Halo, a Group 1 placegetter and champion sire in Argentina, More Than Ready retired for duties in 2001.

The horses first crop made an immediate impact with two-year-olds winning races at Rosehill and Moonee Valley and as the sires’ credentials have grown so has the quality mares the horse has covered.

Breeders’ have noted a trend with More Than Ready’s proving to be an outcross for mares with Danehill blood with Benicio and Perfectly Ready both being out of mares by the son of Danzig. While, Sebring (ex Purespeed), trained by Gai, won the Group 1 Golden Slipper and history shows that horse retired to stud being a dual Group 1 winner and crowned the champion two-year-old in Australasia.

Along with Sebring, More Than Ready has Phelan Ready (ex Nancy Eleanor) winner of the 2009 Group 1 Golden Slipper the high-class mare, More Joyous (ex Sunday Joy) a winner of 21-races with 20 of those being stakes victories and eight are at the highest level.

A proven source of quality thoroughbreds with 14 group one winners worldwide, eight of those are in the southern hemisphere with worldwide statistics revealing 1,147 winners from 1,593 starters that's a winner to runner ratio of 72% and includes 126 stakes winners and 115 stakes placegetters with earnings of more than $123million.

NOT ENOUGH?  Cinque Cento won five races from distances that ranged from 1200m to 2000m and earned connections more $773,530. Along with the 2007 Group 1 Doomben Cup (2020m), Group 2 SAJC Queen of the South Stakes (1600m), Group 3 Doomben Roses Stakes (2020m) and the Listed MRC W J Adams Stakes (1200m) Cinque Cento was also runner-up to Vitesse Dane in the Group 1 2005 Queensland Oaks and third behind the El Segundo in the 2007 Dato’ Tan Chin Nam Stakes (registered name: John F. Feehan) at Moonee Valley.  El Segundo went on to win the W.S. Cox Plate two starts later.

This colt is bred on a cross that has produced the stakes placegetter Suprassing (ex Superior Star) a winner of six races and a winning full brother, Dormello.

The superlatives and the headlines, as deserved as they may be, are not the full story.

The training prowess of Gai Waterhouse is best appreciated by the bare facts and the numbers that support them.

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 that same year. Her first Group One win was delivered by Te Akau Nick in October that year and the first of seven Sydney trainers’ premierships came in only her third full season.

Waterhouse has trained an average of 100 winners a year in the 21 years she has been licensed. In the 2002-2003 racing season she had trained 156 winners in Sydney, a record that matched that of her father T J Smith.

The victory of Fiorente in the 2013 Melbourne Cup placed her alongside Bart Cummings as the only trainer to lead in the winners of both the most famous race in Australia and the 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 HaniganWaterhouse has also won seven Doncaster Handicaps, four of them in succession. She has twice trained 11 Group One winners in a season and up to the halfway mark of the 2013-2014 racing year her horses had collected 123 Group One wins.

As impressive as the Waterhouse record may be at the upper level, her ability to get returns for owners across the board is an equally significant tribute.  With only three months remaining of the 2013-14 season Waterhouse has saddled 771 runners who have bought home more than $70 million in prizemoney. Over this period her 147.5 wins have given her a strike rate of 19.20%, the highest of Australia's top five trainers has Waterhouse a small margin away from John, Michale and Wayne Hawkes whom have the best strike rate of any trainer with more than 400 starters. Her minor placings are coming in at a rate of better than one-in-two, pushing her total runners-to-earners ratio to better than 70%.

And, according to the lady herself, “there’s more where that came from”.