On familiar turf – Smith eyes Group 1 breakthrough for Idle Flyer

To find a clue to how close Matthew Smith is to training his next Group 1 winner, the Sydney trainer’s most recent success at that level is likely to provide the best answer.

In a career that has taken him around the world to learn from racing luminaries such as Aidan O’Brien in Ireland and Bart Cummings in Australia, three horses have delivered Smith five Group 1 wins.

The latest of those came in 2022, when the So You Think mare Nimalee ambushed her rivals with a $31 triumph in the Queen of the Turf Stakes.

There would be added significance as Nimalee’s win gave champion jockey Damien Oliver a 129th Group 1 victory to overtake George Moore’s long-standing tally.

Oliver no longer holds the record, having been surpassed by James McDonald, but there is an expectation that this year’s edition of the $1 million weight-for-age race for fillies and mares at Randwick on Saturday can produce the same result for Smith.

On paper, the Smith-trained Idle Flyer is rated as a clearly superior chance than Nimalee, who finished out of the placings in the Group 2 Emancipation Stakes in her lead-up before making easy work of a testing track at Randwick.

Idle Flyer has recovered from an interrupted start to her autumn with an Emancipation Stakes win that has Smith convinced the mare will be in pristine order for the Queen of the Turf.

Nimalee, who was sold at the end of her racing career for a Chairman’s Sale-topping $3.6 million to join the Coolmore broodmare band, is an obvious reference point for Smith to assess Idle Flyer’s prospects.

“She’d be right up with (Nimalee), definitely. She measures up with her for sure,” Smith told The Straight.

“I mean, you don’t know until they get a bit older and a bit more mature and have a bit more racing as to where they’re going to end up.

“She’s only lightly raced to be fair, but to me she’s right there with her work and the way she looks.”

While Nimalee cost $270,000 as a Premier Yearling Sale graduate, Idle Flyer found her way into Smith’s stable for $70,000 from the Classic Yearling Sale.

It says as much for Smith’s eye for a horse as it does about the economics for a mid-scale operation doing its utmost to combat the purchasing power of its contemporaries.

“We can’t take on those bigger stables spending all that money on yearlings,” he said.

“We don’t have the budget, so we look for horses that are a bit of value, that may grow into something and develop into a nice horse.”

Idle Flyer, a Dundeel filly, fits that mould perfectly after being identified through a pedigree-led approach from owner Lex Tall.

It was then left to Smith and bloodstock agent Brett Howard to assess her as a physical type.

“She was quite backward. Typical of Dundeel in that she was a bit leggy, but she’s grown into a beautiful mare now,” Smith said.

Since Nimalee’s win, the Queen of the Turf has belonged to Chris Waller, and the champion trainer has the favourite Lady Shenandoah this year in his quest to win the race for the fourth year in a row.

Smith has never pretended to play the same game as the sport’s heavyweights, and he is under no illusions about the task confronting Idle Flyer against five Group 1 winners.

The presence of Pride Of Jenni, Lady Shenandoah, Treasurethe Moment, Lazzura and Leica Lucy makes it one of the deeper mares’ races of the 2025/26 season.

“She’ll need to be bloody good to win … it’s a bloody hard race,” Smith says.

Smith, who will also have an ATC Australian Oaks runner on Saturday in Mountain Queen.

Mountain Queen is a homebred, with Smith training her sire Fierce Impact to three Group 1 wins.

She will take her place in Classic with a mission to make the race a true examination of stamina – and a need for stable visibility when it counts most.

“You need to have horses that are competitive during the carnival because if you can, it allows you to not only maximise your earning capacity but it makes up for the rest of the year,” he said.

“It’s hard to find the right horses that are good enough to run during the carnival. It is getting harder and harder because the bigger stables are getting bigger and bigger.”

Smith has already gone close this autumn, with Dezignation, who is Nimalee’s brother, finishing second in last week’s ATC Australian Derby in a result that defied his starting price.

“I was confident he’d run top four when the rain came … he was the fittest horse in the race and had the right foundation,” he said.

That performance, along with a string of other placings, has underpinned a season Smith describes simply as “chipping away”.

“We’re happy with where we’re at … as long as the horses keep running well, we can’t complain,” he said.

At a meeting when all eyes in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes will be another mare, the unbeaten Autumn Glow, Smith is more than happy to have Idle Flyer as a support act.

Whether she can deliver a second Queen of the Turf Stakes for him remains to be seen, but Smith knows opportunities like this are hard-earned and should rarely be wasted.

“Hopefully she can be good enough to win … we’ll just have to wait and see,” he said.