A Star was born - Denise Martin's remarkable racing journey

The article was written for the Magic Millions magazine and has been republished with permission.  The 2024 edition of the Magic Millions magazine is now available.   

If age is a question of mind over matter, Denise Martin doesn’t mind so it doesn’t matter. The face of Star Thoroughbreds is, by her own admission, a mature-age woman, but who’s asking? “A few people, actually,” she says. “I’ve been asked, not often but a few times, when I’m going to step back. I guess when people know you’ve been involved in a business for a long time in our industry, perhaps they think your career may be coming to a time limit.”

For Martin, it’s a little annoying, a bit like when Cher was asked if she was too old to rock ‘n’ roll. The music icon dashed off to check with Mick Jagger. “I wonder if they’re asking the same question of the mature-age men?” Martin says.

For nearly 30 years, Denise Martin has run Star Thoroughbreds up the board of Australian racing. It started in the 1990s with a luckless Kenmare gelding called French Roulette, then continued into the summery heights of Danglissa until such horses as Sebring, Theseo and Driefontein.

There’s been D’Argento, Invincibella, Foxplay and Fiesta, not to mention Espiona. All along the way, Martin has been the felicitous captain of the ship.

“It’s been the greatest journey,” she says. “When I look back at it, I suppose I should be a bit surprised about the amount of success we’ve had, but I wasn’t going to have it any other way when I started all those years ago.”

As far as ownership syndicates go, there are few as enduring and successful in Australia as Star Thoroughbreds. The group’s purple silks and white stars are a racecourse staple, and a staple in the loftiest targets. Martin and her owners have won the Golden Slipper, the Epsom, the Magic Millions 2YO Classic, the Coolmore and Flight Stakes, the Tattersall’s Tiara and the Rosehill Guineas, to name a few.

To date, Star’s total stakes haul is a mystery but significant, and there isn’t a more winning ownership group when it comes to Magic Millions.

Since 2006, Star Thoroughbreds has cheered home 11 individual winners of 14 Magic Millions races. Its first was Ulladulla at Wyong nearly 18 years ago, and horses like Conquestador and Lustica followed. Kinnersley won the Magic Millions Subzero, and Whittington the Magic Millions Snippets. Driefontein is the group’s 2YO Classic winner, while Jubilance and Deroche were winners of the Tasmanian features. Theseo won the Magic Millions Cup, and, lately, Invincibella ripped through three consecutive years of winning the Magic Millions Fillies and Mares.

Such results come from buying around 45 yearlings each year, give or take, and time behind the catalogue has given Martin an eye for a marketable racehorse. She loves a chestnut, and she gives equal weight to colts and fillies. She has stories about the horses that were initially hard to syndicate, like Sebring, and those that sold in no time at all. She remembers prices, dates and people like it all happened yesterday.

And all of this success in racing came after Martin reinvented her life halfway through it. She has been a school teacher and a high-rolling manager in high-end hospitality before leaping, feet first, waist-deep, into the world of racehorse syndication.

“It was about 1993 when I set out with this plan for Star Thoroughbreds,” she says. “I felt at the time that if I was going to do this, if I was going to develop my own business, I would have to make a total commitment to its success because I knew there’d be a strong element of a male-dominated industry.

"People would think I wouldn’t survive and that I wouldn’t be successful, and why would I want to do this anyway? At the time, I had no pedigree in racing other than working at various hotels where racing people would stay, places like the Sebel Townhouse in Sydney, the Regent of Melbourne and, of course, Jupiters on the Gold Coast.”

It was through her hotel career that Martin made her initial alliance with Gai Waterhouse, one that lasted over 20 years. It was also through this career that Martin perfected the people skills that has made Star Thoroughbreds so successful.

“I started by giving it five years,” she says. “That was what I told friends and associates at the beginning, but I genuinely wanted it to be a success. I was giving the business a full commitment to create a high-quality brand.

"People asked me why I wanted to do it, why I wanted to start Star, and it was because I wanted to see if I could do it, if I could run my own business. But I wanted to contribute in some way, to do something where I wasn’t just a member of the industry by default, but somebody who had a significant place in it, and not for myself but for the business.”

Martin was recreating her career in mid-life, which isn’t an easy thing to do. She’d had decorated jobs in hotels all around the world, from Australia’s capital cities to South Africa and London.

"People asked me why I wanted to do it, why I wanted to start Star, and it was because I wanted to see if I could do it, if I could run my own business."

She was divorced, independent, and while there’s no doubt she saw herself through tough times, her enthusiasm was never in question and she pursued success.

“I knew it would happen for me because I was going to make it happen,” she says. “I came from a family where hard work was considered the formula to create success. So that’s what I did. I associated myself with the best trainer and I worked hard, and when Danglissa won us our first Group One and the Princess Series, I knew we had made it. I knew then that it was going to work.”

Martin talks about Star’s first winner at Wyong, a gelding called Slewzam, through to Danglissa, Sebring, and all the top racehorses the group has competed since then. But she insists it’s not about her. She shies away from taking the credit for any of it, deflecting instead to the loyal support of good owners.

Likewise, she has committed to the people side of her business as much as the business itself. For 21 years, she worked as closely with Waterhouse as a syndicator possibly can, and she has since been with Chris Waller at Rosehill for a decade.

Her assistant, Irish ex-pat Emma Cully-Fuller, has been with her just as long, so if a business’s true reflection is how long it keeps its staff, Star Thoroughbreds must be among the best.

The Martin and Waterhouse alliance was a famous, fabulous one while it lasted. The split was big news in 2014, but Martin wasn’t, and still isn’t, about headlines or drama. Waterhouse remains one of the most impressionable people in her life, but Martin moved quietly on because it was time to, and her training association with Chris Waller Racing has been just as good.

Waller is a private individual, which Martin respects. Though the Sydney trainer might have every right to be, he’s never bigger than his individual owners, and that’s a value that aligns heavily with Star Thoroughbreds.

“Denise is the same person every day,” Waller says. “She doesn’t let the emotions of racing get involved, accepting the good with the bad and the bad with the good. They’re the people that you really enjoy working with because it’s not always plain sailing. But with Denise, it is always enjoyable and it is always worthwhile.”

The filly Invincibella is Waller’s favourite Star association to date. He said those three consecutive years when she won the Magic Millions Fillies and Mares is a vivid memory for the elation it brought everyone on the Gold Coast’s most spectacular day of racing.

"With Denise, it is always enjoyable and it is always worthwhile" - Chris Waller

And, according to Waller, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. He has spent long enough with Martin to see how she operates on a professional and personal level, and to him, there’s not much difference between the two.

“Denise respects all of her clients’ investments,” he said. “And not only their initial investment but their ongoing investment. Repeat business is what it’s about, making sure you get a return. But that’s how she is as a person too. I would count her among my friends. If I had a list of 20 people that I had to invite to dinner, Denise would be there, possibly at the head of the table.”

For all her niceness, however, Waller said Martin has a tiger’s eye for thoroughbreds. She works closely with Brett Howard of Randwick Bloodstock during sales season, but she holds her own.

“She’ll try most stallions and she’s got a great eye herself,” Waller said. “She doesn’t need us. She knows what she wants and she knows what will sell, and she can afford those horses that are good types by a stallion that hasn’t yet made a name for itself. Those type-horses are expensive but she loves them, so she finds her way through them and gets what she can.”

Martin isn’t one to fish around for praise or validity, which is probably why it comes her way so often.

“Respect, courtesy, consideration and kindness, these have always been important to me,” she says. “When you come home at night and look in the bathroom mirror, you want to be comfortable with what you see. I never want to be bigger than the business, I never want to be more powerful than anybody else.

"I just want to be seen to be somebody who takes pride in what she has created, and cares about her owners enormously. If I can give them a lovely racing experience, hopefully that is something they will find lasting because, unfortunately, success in anything is not guaranteed.”