Synonymous with success in WA, a complete rebuild at the start of 2022 has established a new era for the husband-and-wife training team of Grant and Alana Williams.
When the news broke in January 2022 that powerful owner-breeder Bob Peters and leading trainers Grant and Alana Williams were set to split after a decade of dominance, it was apparent the WA racing landscape had been altered forever.
Together with star jockey William Pike, the partnership had collected feature wins for fun, with the likes of Arcadia Queen, Delicacy and Truly Great dominating Group 1 races in Peters’ famed cerise and white silks.
Even Victoria wasn’t safe, with the second iteration of the All-Star Mile quinella’ed by Regal Power and Superstorm, one of the crowning moments of the Peters Investments dynasty across decades of success.
The rumblings of a potential split gathered momentum in November 2021, and following the end of the Perth Carnival, it was confirmed that Peters would no longer have horses with the husband-and-wife duo two months later.
Grant, a former harness driver-turned-trainer, and Alana, a former jockey, executed a hard reset on their operation, walking away from a successful, yet strained, relationship to train on their terms.
“It wasn’t the easiest thing we’ve ever done, we wanted a change,” Williams told The Straight. “We’d had enough of Bob and he’d had enough of us, so we wanted to rebuild.
“It ended up happening a bit quicker than we first thought as well.
“We’ve gone from private to public, and we’ve invited everybody into our stables. We’ve got a lot of old clients that have come back to us… Lynward Park has come back to us which is really good.
“We did a lot of advertising early, and we’re pretty lucky to have the client base that we have and a lot of people supporting us.”
Also in their corner is Pike, who has been an almost constant part of the partnership’s journey, with almost 500 wins, eight of which have come at Group 1 level, credited to the combination.
“We’ve been lucky with the jockey that we’ve had in Willie (Pike), raceday is sort of left up to him,” Grant said.
“It’s been really good, we’ve come through together, Willie used to ride for us when he was an apprentice and we only had a couple of horses.
“We’ve had a really good friendship between his family and our family for more than 20 years now, it’s been really special.
“He’s the gun jockey that he is, and the combination works really well.”
Such is the talent of Pike, form and data have historically taken a back seat, with Williams explaining, “We don’t get into that stuff too much, it may be something that we introduce into our business down the track, but we’ve never been big on form.”
Weeks away from the end of the season, Grant and Alana have already surpassed 100 winners across the state, the first time they’ve cleared a century since 2019/20.
As Williams tells it, their stellar season has been forged off the back of a strong team and hard work since the split.
“We haven’t done anything differently, all of our systems are still the same, we’ve got a really good client base,” he said.
“On the business side of it I’ve got some of the best riders and ground staff in the state that we can rely on.
“We just had to put our head down for about 12-to-18 months, and now it’s starting to really work out for us.”
Teamwork extends to the yearling market, where they have been a consistent presence at eastern seaboard yearling sales since reinvigorating their model, shopping across Magic Millions, Inglis and further afield to Karaka in order to find yearlings for their clients.
The strategy has borne fruit; one of their stable stars, the three-year-old Keshi Boom, was bought for $120,000 at the Gold Coast March Yearling Sale in 2022.
When asked about their bloodstock selection, Williams was quick to point out that it’s not a solo effort in sourcing their next class of racehorses.
“I’ve got a very good team behind me, we have quite a lot of eyes that look at these horses,” he said
“Good friends Michael and Carolyn Grant have gotten very good at looking at yearlings, Suman Hedge helps us as well.
“We don’t tend to look at the two-year-old types, we look for something that will be a Guineas kind of horse.
“We’ve been pretty lucky in the last couple of years, I think our purchases have been pretty good, and we’ve been really happy with a lot of the two-year-olds that are starting to race now and a lot of the yearlings that are getting broken in.”
Such is the concentration on finding a capable three-year-old type, that despite being a dominant force in the WA training ranks, the team have never won a two-year-old stakes race.
According to Williams, with only six juvenile stakes races in WA each season, there’s no burning desire to break the duck in the near-future.
“It’s not high on our bucket list,” he said. “We’ve won a few two-year-old races in the latter part of the season, but we are big on letting the horses find their feet, not pushing them too early.
“I think there’s a big risk in trying to push a horse too early, I think it affects them in the future.
“We let the horses develop under our care, take it slowly early and when they’re ready to go, you can race them as much as you want and they have good careers.”
It’s not just yearling sales where they are filling their Karnup-based facility, with the pair managing to secure an old stable favourite off Inglis Digital in October last year.
Western Empire fetched a $150,000 bid from his original trainers, and he has quickly repaid the faith, winning consecutive Group 3s in May when taking out the Northam Stakes and the Belmont Sprint.
Originally set to travel in the spring, Williams confirmed that he would stay home this time around, but an autumn campaign is a possibility.
“Western Empire just started to get a couple of issues towards the end of last prep which made us realise he’s a bit more fragile than he used to be, so we don’t want to take the risk of traveling with him right now - he’s had a few tummy issues,” the trainer said.
“We want him to have another good preparation in our care before we potentially whiz him over for the autumn.”
Success on the track aside, Western Empire holds a special place in the Williams family, particularly to Alana, who enjoys a close relationship with the rising seven-year-old.
“I’ve never seen the bond that Alana has with Western Empire, I think it’s because she’s ridden him from day dot,” Grant said.
“He got broken in and then he came to our stable, he wasn’t the easiest of horses to ride but she rode him every day.
“It’s really good to see a horse and a person get along like they do, he’s definitely got a soft side to females, he likes them better than he likes the males!
“It’s funny, I always thought I had that bond with Delicacy, because I traveled with her, it’s like a pet… the horse really connects with you.
“I’ve never seen the bond that Alana has with Western Empire, I think it’s because she’s ridden him from day dot." - Grant Williams
That doesn’t mean Grant and Alana will be unsighted in Victorian form guides this spring, with the pair still eyeing off an opportunity to make more waves on the east coast.
“It’s still high on my agenda, I want to get back over there but I don’t want to go if I haven’t got the right horse,” he said.
“I’m going to head east later in the year with Alsephina, she’s the only one at the moment that we look like taking. She’ll tackle some of the mares' races over there.”
Alsephina, runner up on the Railway Stakes last November, has won nine of her 15 starts and was last seen when sixth in the Group 1 Northerly Stakes in December.
