With Anthony and Sam Freedman having followed in the footsteps of Mick Price and Michael Kent Jr and taken out a satellite operation in Sydney, Matt Stewart examines the motivations behind the shift from state to national operations.
Each to their own in the world of the satellite stable but it doesn’t sit right for Anthony and Sam Freedman to stay put and wave off their horses into the sunset.
They are paid to train them, not dispatch them to far-flung employees working off emailed worksheets.
A niggle of these giant octopus stables with tentacles across multiple properties and states is: “How far away can a trainer be from a horse and still be training it?”
It is a reasonable question both for owners who pay trainers big fees and regulators who hand out licences that most expect would carry certain conditions.
This focus has never been more pressing. Satellites have become more common as stables have grown so big they’ve had to be subdivided.
The Freedmans will soon have 24 boxes at Randwick, a throwback to the 1990s when Lee Freedman trained four straight Golden Slipper winners and Anthony was his eyes, ears and feet on the ground at Randwick. Back then, the brothers were regarded as interchangeable, a partnership before partnerships existed.
Mick Price and Michael Kent Jr now have 16 boxes at Rosehill.
Chris Waller, Annabel Neasham, Ciaron Maher and others have horses all over the eastern seaboard. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Bong Bong or Scone, it doesn’t matter.
Sam Freedman says the irony of the “border war” between Victoria and NSW administrators was that a war of opportunity had arisen for trainers taking advantage of bounties on either side of the Murray River as the battle rages on.
“It’s not ideal in a purist sense but you have to put yourself where the money is,” he said.
Freedman has no issue with trainers who manage vast teams across vast distances via trusted staff and emailed worksheets – “hey, good luck to them” – but he is haunted by a particular scenario.
“My greatest fear is being asked by an owner about their horse and me having not seen the horse and having no idea about it,” he said. “That would terrify me.”
Price accepts that a satellite stable takes horses from his immediate line of vision.
“But that’s where you rely on your stable culture,” he said.
Matt Stewart
Trusted lieutenant Ben Elam heads the Price-Kent Sydney stable.
“Ben has been indoctrinated, you might say. I have full faith in him. He had been with Lloyd Williams for seven years and overseas with trainers like Andrew Balding,” Price said.
“I go up there every few weeks and Junior the same. We alternate. Worksheets are done at home in conjunction with Ben. It’s a system that works well. It’s a natural extension of what we do.
“We had to grow to keep up. The bigger and more successful you are, the more successful you get. The standard mentality of an owner in this country is to look at the list, see who is on top and give that trainer the best horses. It’s the flywheel of business. It creates its own momentum for the big stables.
“Some owners are loyal, some play very hard. We have to respond to that and that means getting bigger and stretching wider.”
While the pop-up prize money race between Sydney and Melbourne has diminished the overall product, it has been a call to action.
“New South Wales is a very, very good racing environment,” Price said. “There are gaps down here that NSW fills. For instance, we are very bare down here for horses rated 70-100. They have $100,000 maiden races. All the big studs are there. Victoria is good but the big are getting bigger and if you’re not growing your business and your database, you’re falling behind.
“I won’t be training forever. I’m creating a business and a database of over 1000 clients that these young guys, the likes of Ben and Junior, will inherit one day and hopefully give them a leg-up.
“I get sick of asking trainers up there for one box that they don’t really have during carnival time. It’s logistically a big thing to set up with staff and so on but it’s absolutely right for us.”
“Some owners are loyal, some play very hard. We have to respond to that and that means getting bigger and stretching wider.”
- Mick Price
Both Price and Freedman said they owed it to their owners to enter what administrators regard as enemy territory. It peeved Racing Victoria that Peter V’landys was able to entice Maher and his clients to a training farm near Bong Bong.
“Rosehill is fantastic. It gives my owners the best of both worlds,” Price said.
Freedman said it would be a “disservice” to clients had they not created a Sydney base. They did not want to arm-wrestle “the big guys” in Sydney. Instead, they are seeking a point of difference.
“We don’t have a client base as broad as, say, Ciaron and Chris Waller and Gai but the point of difference we’ve always had is that we have always been present,” he said.
“I have no issue at all with the way others go about it, none at all. But I think our owners like knowing we are always at the coal face.
“When Dad headed the Freedman stable and they won four Slippers, they always felt they had an advantage because one of them was there, not a foreman looking at a worksheet.”
Price said the legal use if Regu-Mate in NSW would improve the performance of his Rosehill-based fillies and mares. Regu-Mate is a product used to ease the symptoms of female horses coming into season. It is banned in Victoria because it contains steroid traces. NSW allows a threshold.
“You will see a quantifiable difference,” Price said.
Both trainers agreed that the warmer temperature in Sydney and further north in Brisbane, where both stables have wintered horses, would provide an overall advantage.
Tim Rowe
“With Dad now based in Sydney, it makes access to Brisbane easier,” Freedman said.
“Dad and I spoke about it two years ago. The horses who come down from Sydney, even as late as October, look a length, two lengths better. So do the Queensland horses.
“I can’t remember the name of the horse last spring but it was from Queensland and I remember thinking “no disrespect but you are racing above your ability”.
“It was because it had come from up north with the sun on its back. Look at the Melbourne Cup winner this year. That win had a lot to do with the winter it (Knight’s Choice) had in Brisbane.
“Two seasons ago, look what we did with Without A Fight after Brisbane, and Moods (Peter Moody) the year before that with Incentivise. There is certainly a climate advantage in Sydney and Brisbane. It’s there, why not use it?”
Freedman sees irony that these perceived war zones provided great opportunity.
“We’d all love to see the industry more united across both states. The purist wants that and in an ideal world you’d have that,” he said.
“The standard of competition drops because of it but the prizemoney is staggering. In a selfish sense, it’s a great scenario.
“Don’t get me wrong. Sydney is a savage place to train. It’s very tough. But it’s also irresistible.”
