The Hayes name is back in the ascendancy as David Hayes closes in on 50 Hong Kong winners for the season, and sons Ben, JD and Will approach 200 winners in Australia. Jessica Owers spoke to David about the Lindsay Park resurgence.
In 2020, when David Hayes returned to train in Hong Kong for the second time, it took just six months for the wheels to fall off at home.
One of his biggest clients, Sheikh Hamdan, died within six months, and Tom Dabernig, his nephew, announced he was exiting the training partnership that Hayes had left intact at Lindsay Park, leaving sons Ben and JD at the wheel.
They were young, the two boys. Some said they weren’t ready, that it would all go wrong.
“And I can understand why people thought that,” Hayes tells The Straight. “But I knew they were ready.”
Dabernig’s exit had all the hallmarks of a family drama. Lindsay Park wasn’t his, and he wanted a future for his own children. For Dabernig, it showed up in an opportunity to train at Warrnambool, but the timing was difficult.
“Tom was the senior trainer at Lindsay Park when I left to go to Hong Kong, and six months later he went out on his own, taking quite a lot of staff and horses with him,” Hayes says. “So the boys were very much on the backfoot at the start. They had to build everything up again.”
Ben Hayes was 31 years old at the time, his brother JD 25. Last year, JD’s twin, former AFL footballer Will, joined the fray.
“We gave them three years with financial support to keep the place up and going,” Hayes says. “The hotel was only 30 per cent full, and you don’t make a lot of money when your hotel is 30 per cent full. So we gave them three years and they filled it (Lindsay Park) in a year-and-a-half.”
In Hayes’s own words, if the operation had been tipping money down the drain, he would have been looking at returning from Hong Kong, downsizing Lindsay Park or selling it. But within 18 months, his three sons had filled every box and climbed the rigging.
“They had to place the horses they had incredibly well because you put yourself in the best company and your horses in the worst, and that was the theme. They put the horses in easy races and avoided the temptation of going too deep, and they found their rhythm.”
The Lindsay Park trio is third in the Australian trainers’ premiership, behind only Ciaron Maher and Chris Waller. They are second in the Victorian equivalent. The Hayes name is back where it belongs.
This season, they’ve saddled the stakes winners Bold Bastille, Here To Shock, Poifect in the Adelaide Guineas and Apulia in the Moonee Valley Vase. Arkansaw Kid won the Gothic Stakes for them and was second in the Sandown Guineas, but Mr Brightside was their poster boy. He won four Group 1 races and nearly $5.5 million in earnings across the season.
What has been the secret?
“They work very hard,” Hayes says. “They’ve got an incredible training facility, which they know how to use because there is no point having a wonderful facility and not being able to use it effectively, and they really do utilise it well.”
In this family, history has had an extraordinary habit of repeating itself. In 1990, when patriarch Colin Hayes retired from training due to failing health, he said he wasn’t going to micromanage his son’s promotion.
“I’ll leave him alone as far as training goes,” he told the Sun-Herald. “I’m not going to be looking over his shoulder all the time, but if he needs me for anything, I’ll be there.”
Thirty-four years later, it’s the same story.
“I don’t get involved with their day-to-day training,” Hayes says. “But my phone is always on when the boys are debating which way they might go. Sometimes I act as a bit of a Judge Judy in conference calls and I tell them what I’d do.
“But they don’t ring as much as they did at the start. They’ve got a system which is a version of mine with some changes, and it’s working very well.”
Hayes has a version of his father’s training, and now his sons have a version of his. That ‘CS’ fundamental is sacred at Lindsay Park, and when Hayes relocated the entire operation in 2010 from South Australia to Victoria, he made sure it went with him.
‘CS is everywhere at the new Lindsay Park,” he says. “His trophies, his wins, his pictures with the Queen, and all the different things he did. All of his success is documented through the property.
“There are little memories of him everywhere, as there will be lots of little memories of me one day, I suppose.”
It’s obvious that each generation of Hayes has reserved the right to make decisions. Most of the time, they’re everyday decisions with little impact, but sometimes they’re not. Despite inheriting a super-stable from his father, which came with one of the largest studs in the country, Hayes opted out of stallions when he left South Australia.
His father would have supported it, he says. Times were different. It was easier to compete in the stallion game when CS Hayes was king.
“There was no Coolmore or Arrowfield then,” Hayes says. “I could see the speed and momentum that those studs were gaining, and I thought I’d rather be a client of theirs than opposition. That was my thinking and that’s why I put all my energy into training horses.
“You can see today just how financially powerful the mega-studs are. It would have been very hard for me to compete at the level Dad used to compete.”
Hayes won’t train in Australia again. When he retires it will be from Hong Kong, and he thinks he will take on a chairman’s-like role at Lindsay Park; hovering without micromanaging, just like his late father.
“They had to place the horses they had incredibly well because you put yourself in the best company and your horses in the worst, and that was the theme. They put the horses in easy races and avoided the temptation of going too deep, and they found their rhythm” - David Hayes on his sons' training success
But that’s a while away. The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC) brought him back in 2020 and, despite a few COVID-19 bumps in the middle, he is doing well. From an average of 48 horses (it’s a little higher now), Hayes has 47 seasonal wins and is anxious to hit 50.
He is ranked inside the top 10 of Hong Kong trainers, just behind John Size, and his tally of 47 wins is a quick improvement on his 34 of last season.
The star of his stable is the Shamexpress gelding Ka Ying Rising, Hayes improving the horse’s rating from 52 at the start of the season to a current 111. The gelding has won his last four races, demolishing the Group 3 Sha Tin Vase field on June 2 to declare himself Hong Kong’s newest sprinting force.
“They say you do well here if you have 70 per cent winners to the number of horses you have, and I’ve achieved well above that,” Hayes says. “You have to train 16 winners in a season or you’re on notice, so I’ve passed that and I’ve passed the medical with flying colours.
“So I’m OK. I’ve got a job next year.”
Hong Kong suits Hayes. He likes its climate and cuisine, and he likes that they race twice a week.
“You go to work every day but you don’t have the pressures of runners every day. It’s like a working holiday. In Australia, you never stop. Hong Kong is one of the best places you can be.”
Hayes is the only trainer ever granted a return licence by the HKJC. The second time around it’s less stressful. He’s older and the nest is empty. When he last left Hong Kong it was 2005 and he’d been there a decade. When he leaves this time, it will be the end of his trainer’s ticket anywhere.
But that is what he has been working towards, and the succession plan at Lindsay Park has made it easier now.
“The boys are going to have a strong year again, and I think I’m going to have a pretty strong year again,” he says. “It’s pretty good when a plan comes off.”
