Chris Waller is approaching yet another milestone and looks destined to beat Ciaron Maher to become the first trainer in Australia to bank $50 million in prize money in a single season.
Waller, Australia’s top prize money earner in each of the past 12 seasons, has 20 runners nationally on Saturday and, according to Racing Australia, needs just over $430,000 in prize money to break through the $50 million mark for this season, something that has never been achieved.
At this point, 46 weeks into the season, Waller’s horses have been averaging an extraordinary $1.08 million in prize money every week, or $154,211 a day. For every starter he has had this season - there have been 2017 of them - the prize money collected has been $24,619.
Trainers usually take 10 per cent of prize money, which in Waller’s case would equate to a minimum of $5 million flowing back to the stable in this season alone.
Extend that back over the last decade and Waller has collected just short of $390 million in prize money, with $39 million of that allocated back to his stable. That is around 5.3 per cent of all the prize money paid out in Australia in that time.
The champion trainer has been able to sail on extraordinary returns thanks to the explosion of prize money in the past decade.
As a measure of that, his runners will earn 2.3 times the amount of prize money this season as they did in 2013/14. In the same period, his number of annual runners have only gone up 25 per cent and his total winners have increased by only 16 per cent.
However, Waller isn’t the only one cashing in on the explosion of prize money in that time. Also closing in on the $50 million mark is Maher, combining his earnings with those earned in his partnership with David Eustace, which ended in January.
Maher is set to eclipse Waller when it comes to the national trainers’ premiership for the second straight season. He has a 38-win lead with 40 days left in the campaign.
His runners have banked $48.4 million in prize money. That is nearly $12 million more than last season with only 47 more runners and 44 fewer winners than last season. Put simply, Maher’s strike rate has gone down, but his ability to win the big-money races has increased.
Maher (and Eustace) has actually won fewer Group 1 races this season (11 to 9), but has had nine runners earn over $1 million this season, compared to five last season.
Significantly, of the $12 million in extra prize money won by Maher’s runners this season compared to last, $11.7 million of that additional money has come in NSW.
Despite it being Waller’s home turf, Maher has been able to target Sydney much more effectively this season. It hasn’t even impacted his rival, with Waller growing his NSW-sourced prizemoney levels from $27.7 million last season to $34.9 million this season.
As a measure of the concentration at the top, there has been around $216 million in metropolitan prize money handed out for Sydney races this season and the top five trainers, Waller, Maher, Waterhouse/Bott, James Cummings and Joe Pride have collected $103 million of that.
The spread in Victoria is a little better. The Top 5 metro trainers in that state, Maher, Waller Cummings as well as Anthony and Sam Freedman and the Hayes brothers, have banked $60 million of the $170 million handed out.
Top 10 seasons for most prize money won by a trainer in Australia
The emerging Waller/Maher duopoly has garnered plenty of attention over the past couple of years, but where does it sit historically in terms of dominance in Australian racing?
Last season, Waller’s winnings were 4.78 per cent of total Australian prize money, down from his career-high in 2019/20, when he won 6 per cent of all Australian prize money. That is the highest of any Australian trainer in a season in the current century. The season 2018/19 was only slightly lower for Waller at 5.92 per cent.
For comparison, the next best winner when it comes to this stat is John Hawkes, who in 2002/03 won 5.67 per cent of Australian prize money.
Maher and Waller combined are projected to claim over 11 per cent of Australian prize money between them this season. The only two seasons where the top two trainers combined for more than 10 per cent was in 2017/18 (Waller and Darren Weir) and 2002/03 (Hawkes and Gai Waterhouse).
Bren O’Brien
But if it feels like those two stables have an unprecedented numerical dominance when it comes to runners, the stats don’t quite back that up.
We can project that they will have around 4400 starters this season, which while that will be the highest for the two most active Australian trainers since 2018/19, pales in comparison to 2017/18, when Weir and Waller combined for 5509 starters.
For a broader reference there were 180,000 starters in Australia in that 2017/18 season, so that represented only 0.3 per cent of all those. There were just over 3200 trainers who had starters.
Percentage of total prize money won by leading trainer in each Australian season
