‘Horses change with time, and you have to change with them’ – Joe Pride on social media, Godolphin and making multi-millionaires

Joe Pride is rapt with his career, especially of late, but jokes that his alter-ego may have run his race.

The trajectory of Joe Pride, trainer, has been phenomenal. The last few months have been stunning.

@PrideRacing, Pride’s occasionally combative X handle, has struck interference.

“Ha, Twitter, what a world that is,” Pride joked of his run-ins, the latest related to the seemingly untouchable “Racing Blogger”.

“I may have run my race there.” 

On track, two stats leap off the page.

Of the 21 Australasian horses to have won $10 million in stake money, four have been trained by Pride: Private Eye ($12,718,285), Think About It ($12,163,050), Ceolwulf ($10,936,795) and the more recent addition Mazu ($10,215,950).

Had dear old Eduardo ($7,926,650) poked his head out a little further in the 2021 Everest and won it instead of being beaten a long neck into third, he’d have been the fifth.

For context, four Pride horses won more than Black Caviar, a $7,95 million earner whose unbeaten career ended before The Everest and the other pop-ups that have been targeted so lethally by Pride.

Just recently, Pride and his boutique stable of just 50 horses edged clear of the superpowers to become the most successful trainer in Godolphin’s public training era, with 10 winners across five different horses.

The most impressive has been Attica, winner of the Spring Champion Stakes at Randwick late last month. “I see it as a badge of honour. Godolphin sent nine horses each to a group of trainers and that’s as close as you can get to a level playing field,” Pride said.

Attica is poised to become the next great Pride horse and the list of stable stars carries an important asterisk. Imports have flooded the ranks of Australian racing, yet Pride has ignored them, saying they’re too risky. Of the 111 horses listed against his name on Racing NSW, just one, Estadio Mestalla is from overseas, and he was an online purchase.

Think About It, Private Eye, Ceolwulf, Eduardo, Attica, Terravista, Mazu: all Australasian-breds, some second-hand patch-up jobs and providers of the bulk of Pride’s 22 Group 1 wins, putting him 33rd on the all-time list.

At a relatively youthful age of 53, Pride will keep climbing.

Few trainers are held in the same reverence as Pride. One stands out – his former boss and mentor John Size.

Size, the king of Hong Kong, whose unique training methods have made him a near-mystical figure and impossible to replicate, deflects the suggestion that he “made” Joe Pride.

Pride was Size’s foreman for four years in Sydney in the 1990s before Size created his legend in Hong Kong.

“Can you keep me out of the story, just mention me in passing if you really have to?” Size said.

“Joe deserves all the credit. It’s about him, not me. I think he’d be sick of my name always coming up. He’d have gone to the top of the grade with or without me.”

Pride says Size is “being far too modest”.

“When he left, I said “can you stay two more years? I haven’t learned enough yet. But he left me with some gear and some owners and said ‘away you go’,” Pride said.

Pride had worked for Bill Mitchell at Randwick before taking up a foreman’s role with Size, who impressed and confused his contemporaries. Size barely seemed to train his horses, at least conventionally, and wore a permanent poker face in both victory and defeat.

He rarely said much, let alone broadcast it, let alone entertain the notion of social media.

“I never saw him lose his cool, he took zero notice of what was going on around him. What other people were doing or saying, he couldn’t care less,’ Pride said of Size.

Pride’s well-known social media presence proved that while he was a student of Size, he was not a clone.

Pride chuckles at the combative life of his social media alter-ego.

“It’s not easy to shut the outside noise out, at least to me. You get these great horses who become public horses. At times, you find yourself defending them and yourself. But Twitter, it’s a crazy world,” he said.

“What some people don’t seem to realise is, I’m taking the piss most of the time. But I’m becoming increasingly aware of the pitfalls and probably getting a little bit tired of the negativity that comes back.”

Pride’s social media has helped smash the wall between the realities of training life and the oft-misplaced opinions outside of it.

Last week, Pride stumbled into the topic of “Bloggsy” and whether the local racing media should follow the lead of the omnipresent Pommy visitor.

Pride shuddered at the thought of open slather for podcasters, posting: “Exactly what trainers and jockeys need, lunatic wannabe bloggers driving us insane in our workplace making videos to make them famous.”

Former Melbourne Racing Club chairman Mike Symons joined the conga line, posting a “massive misread” from Pride who responded “… one more time for the dummies … I’m not talking about Bloggsy.”

Pride’s parochialism for his horses has always been great fodder. A decade ago, he playfully teased that Rain Affair was the horse who’d smash Black Caviar’s picket fence.

He was left with egg on his face. In Melbourne, Pride was regarded as a Sydney spruiker.

“Yeah, I remember the Rain Affair thing,” Pride said with a hearty laugh. “I guess if you put yourself out there, that can happen.”

In 2014, Pride tweeted, “Terravista, World’s Best Sprinter”, only for Terravista to then run fifth to Lankan Rupee in the Manikato Stakes. Pride said he “couldn’t believe” the reaction to his jovial tweet but was vindicated when Terravista won the Darley Sprint and was officially rated the world’s best sprinter, alongside Lankan Rupee.

Punters may occasionally agitate but they mostly marvel at Pride much the same as they have Size. He runs a Warwick Farm boutique but holds his own with the massive multi-state operations.

Like all great trainers, he cannot be replicated. Like Size, he confuses his contemporaries.

Pride paid $NZ170,000 for Ceolwulf at the 2022 New Zealand Bloodstock Ready To Run Sale, an event that has rapidly become a leading source of future champions.

Pride returned to Sydney on Tuesday after casting his eye over the 2025 prospects. While Casserouse continued Pride’s great run with Godolphin at Rosehill on Wednesday, the trainer secured two-year-olds by Tarzino and Tassort.   

He says his strategy is simple, but it’s also complex.

“I guess after looking at horses for 25 years, what you like is embedded in the memory bank. To me it’s not a hard task because you know what you like and you know in an instant,” he said.

“If you have to walk away from a horse and come back again, you don’t like it. It’s a very simplistic approach. I don’t look much at pedigree and I’m not as big on condemning faults as some. I’ve had many good horses with conformation faults. Good horses run through anything.”

Pride said he “missed the boat” to tap into the import market but has no regrets.

“They’re too expensive and too many fail. They are so hit and miss, and you only see the ones that make it to the track,” he said.

“I’d rather steer clear and train the local product suited to our conditions. It’s worked pretty well for me.”

Pride says it’s impossible to pass up the big bucks of the pop-up era and his four $10 million-plus earners are proof of his great plundering.

He laments the lost days when races like the Cox Plate were all-roads-in. Ceolwulf and Mr Brightside would previously have been automatic Cox Plate runners but the $5 million King Charles Stakes run at Randwick a week earlier meant the ranks were split.

“One hundred per cent. I grew up watching racing in the late 80s and 90s and it was all about the Cox Plate,” he said.

“We all miss that. But my job is about winning and prize money and if there is a $5 million race in Sydney, I’m gonna look hard at it. If the Cox Plate and King Charles had been a fortnight apart, Ceolwulf would have run in both.”

Ceolwulf won the King Charles for the second straight year, bypassed the Plate, then won the Champions Mile the following Saturday.

Pride appears to make fewer mistakes than most. His CV of extraordinary stake-earning horses, none imported, some second-hand and patched up, is proof.

He may soon take his foot off the social media pedal, but he’s never been shy to admit to mistakes or bash out a tweet to defend his decisions.

“You try to make less mistakes the further you go into it but they’re unavoidable,” he said.

“That said, a lot of people just don’t realise. Private Eye was a good example. People were tweeting that he should have stepped up to a mile (in one campaign) but what they didn’t realise is that at that time, sprinting brought out the best version of him.

“Horses change with time, and you have to change with them.

“My response to the detractors was two words: $12 million.”