Adiella will be out to defy humble beginnings on more than one level when she contests the $700,000 Tattersall’s Tiara at Eagle Farm.
Taking on the best that a Chinese billionaire’s money can buy and the might of a trainer who is rewriting the record books, John Dann needs no reminder about the challenge.
It’s the reality of Australian thoroughbred racing these days.
But the Toowoomba businessman, part-time horseman and a self-confessed hobbyist will be doing his part in tandem with jockey Nikita Beriman to keep some romanticism of the turf alive in the $700,000 Tattersall’s Tiara at Eagle Farm on Saturday.
Dann bred, part-owns and trains Adiella, who will be trying to enhance an unfashionable pedigree in the last Group 1 race of the Australian season, a weight-for-age contest restricted to fillies and mares that also doubles Dann’s introduction to racing at the elite level.
To have three Tiara runners - Semana, Grinzinger Belle and Coco Sun - Yulong’s Zhang Yuesheng recently spent more than $4 million across two sales.
From the hundreds of horses Chris Waller conditions out of an all-conquering stable, the champion trainer will have at least the same number as Zhang in his corner as he bids for a record-extending 20th Group 1 win in 2024/25.
Contending with Zhang’s no-matter-the-cost vision for global expansion while trying to put a small dent in Waller’s relentless and record-breaking approach to training Group 1 winners ranks as a formidable and intimidating exercise for even the best of their contemporaries.
Dann will be relying mostly on a passion that he has turned into a pastime with no more than a handful of family-reared horses on his books.
“I've been training for probably 30 odd years … probably a bit longer than that and we don’t have a lot of horses at the moment,” he told The Straight.
“We only do it as a hobby. Breed a few, race a few. That's what we do.”
Beriman is no stranger to fairytales. She famously partnered young trainer Ciaron Maher to his first Group 1 win aboard Tears I Cry in 2007. She is still waiting her second, having only had nine opportunities to add to that success in the 18 years since.
If Group 1 races were decided on bloodlines, Adiella’s chances in the Tiara would be forlorn in the eyes of most breeding buffs.
Thankfully, in racing, pedigree isn’t everything.
Adiella has proven that with a run through classes, culminating in her National Classic win, where, not for the first time, destiny was on Dann’s side.
The result of a hurried decision to find a stallion, Adiella was bound for the yearling sale ring before injury intervened.
“She’s ended up winning a race she shouldn't have won because she was badly weighted and she had a bad barrier,” Dann said.
It was a career highlight that left her trainer with no option but to chase a Tiara victory that can breathe life into a pedigree that has largely been dormant on the score of some black-type recognition until Adiella was runner-up in the Group 3 Pam O’Neill Stakes at Doomben in May.
But that shortcoming didn’t stop Dann’s brother from paying $600 for a mare related to a Listed Woodcote Stakes placegetter at Epsom and further back counts feature race winners in the exotic but far-flung racing location of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.
Report To Me, an unraced Call Report mare, has done a job as a source of winners for Dann’s Toowoomba stable.
She is the dam of Under Suspicion, a Listed Goldmarket Handicap placegetter, and six other winners from 10 foals to race.
Among them is Rosador, a Captain Sonador mare who produced Adiella in a cruel twist of fate that upended a planned mating with Aquis stallion Spill The Beans.
“She was going to be covered by Spill The Beans on the Monday but he passed away that weekend,” Dann said.
“So I rang Aquis they said you can go to whatever stallion you want that we’ve got here.
“They told me they had some really nice foals on the ground by The Mission.
“So I said ‘that’ll do’ and that’s how we got Adiella.”
Adiella is from the second crop of foals by The Mission, the Group 1 Champagne Stakes winner who stood seven seasons at stud in Queensland before his sale to China, leaving Stradbroke Handicap runner-up Yellow Brick, stakes-winning stayer Mission Of Love and Dann’s stable star as the best of his Australian progeny so far.
“We always knew she was probably stakes grade but not for one day did I think she would be going around in a Group 1 race,” Dann said.
“It won’t be easy for her, but stranger things have happened.”
