Annabel Neasham and Rob Archibald’s training operation has extended to Scone as they firmly establish themselves among the biggest stables in the country, writes Tim Rowe.
It’s hard to avoid comparisons between Ciaron Maher and his former protege Annabel Neasham.
The pair is big on ambition, competitive and just as determined to succeed at the highest level of the sport all around the country. Part of that “think big” mentality they both possess includes operating on scale up and down the east coast of Australia.
The Maher megastable was on clear display in Sydney and Melbourne earlier this month by completing a unique Group 1 double.
On Sydney’s biggest day, Maher won $20 million The Everest with Bella Nipotina and in Melbourne he trained the winner of the Caulfield Cup in Duke De Sessa while Neasham and her training partner Rob Archibald also had Sunshine In Paris compete in Australia’s richest slot race.
The five-year-old Sunshine In Paris ran fifth to Neasham’s former boss’s tough-as-nails mare and, in doing so, she banked $1.2 million for her trainers and her owner John Camilleri.
Maher may have justifiably been the centre of attention, Neasham and Archibald also completed a Sydney-Melbourne double of their own that day with Mighty Ulysses winning the Group 3 Moonga Stakes at Caulfield and the Silver Eagle at Randwick with Ostraka. For good measure, they also trained a metropolitan winner at Eagle Farm and another winner at Newcastle.
Ostraka winning the Silver Eagle
This weekend, they also trained winners in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, underscoring the breadth of Neasham and Rob Archibald’s reach.
Racing NSW’s website, which tracks named horses registered per trainer, has Neasham and Archibald with 340 horses, behind only Maher (530), Waller (470) and Lindsay Park (372) for size.
The new training partnership, which began at the start of the current season, was the next step in the steep rise of Neasham who, a little more than four years ago, opened her own stable in Sydney.
She left the safety net of Maher confident in her ability, and the backing of Aquis among other high-profile owners, but it was still a big move.
At that time, she could have gone into partnership with Maher and David Eustace, who is now off the mark in first season of training in the fishbowl environment of Hong Kong, but Neasham chose to do it her way and call all the shots.
She’s grown fast: in profile, success and the stable’s size.
Matt Stewart
Unlike Maher, who trains from a mix of public and private facilities including Ballarat, Cranbourne and Fingal in Victoria and Warwick Farm, Bong Bong and Bobs Farm near Newcastle in New South Wales, the Neasham-Archibald expansion has evolved through on-course stabling.
Neasham already has a permanent presence in Sydney through her main Warwick Farm base as well as stables at Eagle Farm in Brisbane and Pakenham in Victoria and it will soon include a country arm.
The Neasham-Archibald duo is on the cusp of taking over a 30-box complex at Scone in the Hunter Valley, a facility that was previously occupied by disqualified trainer Stephen Jones, and the addition of a country coincides with the relinquishing of the boxes at Rosehill.
The simplification of the Sydney stable to solely operate out of Warwick Farm makes the enormous logistical challenge of overseeing multiple sites slightly less onerous.
Archibald, a former professional polo player from the Hunter Valley who previously worked for Coolmore Australia, says he and Neasham spell horses at he and his brother’s property near Scone, so opening a racing stable made sense.
“We just felt like it was a good addition to what we've got so far, the Scone facilities are being upgraded significantly over the next two to three years,” Archibald told The Straight.
“There are more stables being built, they’ve got a polytrack and it's probably one of the best country tracks in Australia, if not the best, in terms of facilities with access to grass and things like that.
“It’s a good opportunity to train some of our country horses out of there at a slightly cheaper rate to offer something a little bit different to our owners.”
That’s not to suggest that it’ll only be country-class horses who will be trained from Scone.
Sunshine In Paris, for instance, won her maiden at Canberra, a country class track, while fellow Everest runner Stefi Magnetica, a Group 1-winning mare trained by rival Warwick Farm trainer Bjorn Baker, won her maiden at Wellington in central western New South Wales.
“It is a good starting point for some of our other horses to go from Scone and then potentially back down to Sydney a little bit later on in their prep,” Archibald said.
“It just gives us a few more choices and it also gives us the opportunity for some of those highly-strung fillies to get trained in a country environment, which they can often respond well to.”
Trainers such as Waller, who has bases at Rosehill, Warwick Farm, the Gold Coast, Flemington and Mount Macedon, and Lindsay Park’s Ben, Will and JD Hayes also train from multiple locations.
Scone Race Club chief executive Jason Hill is delighted that trainers of Neasham and Archibald’s calibre will be operating out of the premier Hunter Valley course.
“They've certainly committed to making sure that any access that they have to Scone Racecourse and our tracks is not for pre-training, but that it is to have runners coming out of Scone. And we're excited by their commitment to us in that respect,” Hill said.
“There's certainly a financial benefit to all race clubs when trainers and horses that use their facilities run and are successful. We benefit from all of that.”
It’s important to race clubs’ bottom lines because horses registered through stable returns as being trained from their racetracks means they are eligible for Racing NSW’s twice-yearly distribution of money from the regulator’s track maintenance scheme.
While the scheme has become “a little more socialist” in how funds are distributed to clubs by Racing NSW, as it was described by a source familiar with how it is calculated, the number of starters trained from each racecourse forms a major part of the formula used to determine how much money each club receives to help offset the training and racetrack maintenance costs.
For Neasham and Archibald’s part, while there are Maher-led blueprints they could follow, they say Scone is the last of their expansion plans, at least for the foreseeable future, and they have little ambition to reach numbers of horses in training on the level of their peers Maher and Waller.
Bren O’Brien
