Growing dominance

Trainer Henk Grewe has won his second German championship in just his sixth year of training.

Jocelyn de Moubray chats to the man taking German racing by storm

THE COVID YEAR HAS BEEN a difficult one for every trainer in Europe, but for Henk Grewe it has been nevertheless a remarkably successful one. At the time of writing he is sure to be champion trainer in Germany for the second time – with 52 wins he is more than 10 clear of his closest rival Markus Klug.

To have won consecutive championships in his home country in only his fifth and sixth full seasons as a trainer is some achievement, but his success and ambitions are set to allow him to compete with the top trainers in Europe in the years to come.

He has already done so – after all his stable’s 65 wins across Germany, France and Italy in 2020 include 22 black-type races, 13 Group races and two Group 1s.

The only trainers to have won more Group races in Europe in 2020 are the O’Brien’s – Aidan and Joseph – John Gosden and Charlie Appleby.

This is a fact worth repeating. The 37-year-old Grewe in only his sixth full season as a trainer with around 90 horses in his Cologne stable has won more Group races in Europe this year than, to give only the names of the others high up on the list, Andre Fabré, Jean Claude Rouget, Francis Graffard, Mark Johnston, Andrew Balding, Jessica Harrington, and all of the other European trainers aside from the aforementioned four.

Grewe’s Group 1 wins came with Darius Racing’s Donjah in Cologne in August, and with Sunny Queen carrying the colours of Gaynor Rupert’s Cayton Park Stud. She won at Munich in November – both fillies were, as have many of Grewe’s best winners, purchased as yearlings at Baden- Baden.

Sunny Queen: the daughter of Camelot won the Group 1 Grosser Preis Von Bayern in November

His other leading performers in 2020 included Stall Wasserfreunde’s Wonderful Moon, who was only fifth when favourite for the Deutsches Derby (G1) but who won a Group 2 and two Group 3s, Thorin, who won a Group 3 in Deauville, and the two-yearold filly Noble Heidi, who won Germany’s top juvenile race, the Preis der Winterkonigin (G3), as well as races at Chantilly and Compiegne. Finally, Isfahani won the Premio Guido Berardelli (G3) at Chantilly on her only start to date.

Over Breeders’ Cup weekend, Grewe’s ambitions for his stable were revealed.

On the two days he ran 14 different horses on six different tracks in four different countries, and if Donjah’s run at Keeneland didn’t go to plan, the stable ended up with five wins, including a Group 1 and two Group 3s in Munich, Rome, Milan and Croise Laroche.

“It was,” says Grewe, “a little bit crazy! I went to Munich, my wife Natascha was in Kentucky, my assistant went to Italy and we just about had enough people to go to Croise Laroche, Nancy and to look after the

Two of this year’s stars: above, Donjah after winning the Group 1 Preis von Europa, and, below, Wonderful Moon wining a Group 3 at Hanover in October horses who stayed in Cologne.

“At the moment we only have 25 people working for the stable so it was a busy, and successful weekend.”

Donjah was Grewe’s first runner in the US.

“We had,” he recalls, “runners in Canada two years ago, but she was the first in the US. I don’t yet know exactly what went wrong and why she collided with the rail on the backstretch, but she has been a great filly and her next target is the Arqana Breeding Stock Sale in Deauville in December.”

He was a little surprised by Sunny Queen’s win in the Group 1 Grosser Preis von Bayern.

“I had been disappointed when she didn’t win her race before, a Group 3 in Hanover,” he explains. “Although, with hindsight, I think what she needs is a strongly run race and a long testing straight, which is what she got in Munich.

“She will stay in training next year and now she is a Group 1 winner we will try and win Group races with her in France and England.”

His other three-year-old star, the Sea The Moon colt Wonderful Moon, will also stay in training with the aim of winning big races outside Germany.

“He, too, likes a strongly run race as he has a high cruising speed,” Grewe expands. “He looked very good on his seasonal debut in Cologne, but we were not altogether happy with him after the Derby and gave him a long break.

“I could see in his work after his comeback race that he was back to his best and he won very well on his last start in Hanover at the end of October.

“As a four-year-old, I think he will improve on what he has done so far.”

Grewe will start the 2021 season with 120 horses in his care, including around 50 two-year-olds.

“Working for a company gives me the time to concentrate on training and the horses

He and his partners and owners bought yearlings in Baden-Baden and also in Deauville where they spent about €600,000 in September and October on yearlings by the likes of Frankel, Lope De Vega, and Siyouni.

“We have bought more expensive yearlings this time,” Grewe confirms.

“In the past we have rarely spent as much as €100,000 on any horse. We gave €70,000 for Noble Heidi in Baden-Baden, which was far too much for an Intello filly with her pedigree, but I loved her and it has turned out all right.”

Grewe is based on the racecourse in Cologne and trains, like many of Germany’s other top trainers including Peter Schiergen and Waldemar Hickst, mainly on the new Dirt track which was completed in 2019.

“It was the obvious place to start from as it has good facilities and is close to most of the best racecourses in Germany and not far from France,” he adds.

Grewe had been a jockey beforehand and rode 290 winners working with, amongst others, Mario Hofer.

“I always had trouble keeping my weight under control,” he says, “and I always wanted to train.”

He retired from race riding before he was 30 and went to work with Sascha Smrczek, who trains in Dusseldorf, before starting out on his own in 2014.

Grewe does not work for himself, but for the company Grewe Holsbach Training & Racing GmbH. The company is a partnership between himself, Christoph Holschbach, Bruno Faust of Gestüt Karlshof and Lars Baumgarten.

“This business arrangement suits me,” Grewe says. “I take fewer risks than most trainers and get paid a salary as well as a percentage of prize-money and the sale of horses. Working for a company gives me the time to concentrate on training and the horses. We discuss some of the big decisions together, we did for instance agree together to ask Andrasch Starke to become the stable jockey last year, but I am the trainer.”

At the beginning the property developer and racehorse owner Christoph Holschbach was behind the company, but in 2017 Grewe and Holschbach asked Faust and Baumgarten to join them.

B aumgarten has been a prominent owner and breeder in Germany for some years and is also a leading sports agent in Germany. His company Baumgarten Sports and More represents top footballers and tennis players, including among others the ex-world number one Angelique Kerber. In 2017, Baumgarten first sat down with Grewe to talk about horses, training and his future. “I had, of course, known of him before,” Baumgarten remembers. “He once rode for me at Krefeld, but I had never spoken to Henk for more than a minute at a time before. “I am used to talking to young gifted people in sports, that is my business, and one of the first things Henk said to me was, ‘I am the best trainer in Germany!’ “I said, ‘But there is Markus Klug, Andreas Wohler, Peter Schiergen’. “He replied, ‘I didn’t say they are bad trainers, I said I am the best!’ “At the time he had around 30 horses in his stable who were mainly handicappers and claiming horses. I quickly decided to join the company, I like to invest in gifted young people.”

Lars Baumgarten

After observing the stable and Grewe closely for three years Baumgarten sees various different reasons why Grewe is so successful. “First, he is a workaholic,” he says. “Henk doesn’t want to drive a Porsche or have a private plane, he wants to win races and that is what he is focused on from first thing in the morning to last thing at night. “And then he seems instinctively to know the right level for each of horses. Very early in their careers he tells you which are Group horses, which are handicappers, which will be best at two and those who will progress later.

Below, Noble Heidi (Intello) after winning the Group 3 Preis der Winterkonigin

This insight allows him to place his horses so well and decide where, when and over which distance they should be racing.

“He feeds each of his horses every morning and they are as fit as they can be when they go to the races.”

OTHER ASPECTS come to mind too, but Baumgarten admits that is hard to pinpoint any one reason why Grewe is so good at training horses.

“I took a friend to watch the morning work the other day,” he continues.“It was someone who knows little about horses and racing.

“We watched the Grewe string go past and then the horses of Schiergen and of Hickst.

“My friend said that he couldn’t see any difference between the way the different stables worked and, of course, he was right, but what makes the difference is what you don’t see standing on the side of the track.

Baumgarten believes that Grewe is very “clear” in his mind and has the “mental capacity and an approach to training that makes him extraordinary”.

“I work with gifted sports people every day and I have come to understand how important their mental capacity is to their success.

“Angelique [Kerber], for example, is not the most gifted tennis player of her generation, but she worked very hard and is very strong mentally. A top athlete has to have a balance between their conscious and unconscious mind.

“They have to believe in themselves, and they have to stay down to earth. I believe that Henk is clear in his mind and in the way he expresses himself.

“I think he would be a success at the top level anywhere in the world, it might take him time to adapt to a new environment but in the end he would succeed. He reminds me of the young Jurgen Klopp, whom I met 15 years ago.

“There have similarities – Klopp was just an average footballer, Henk an average jockey, but they both have a mental capacity and an approach to training which makes them extraordinary.”

Grewe himself is too focused on his training to ask or answer this type of question.

“Training is,” he says obliquely, “very easy when you have an excellent team around you and high-class horses.”

For the time being he plans to stay in Cologne and Germany but doesn’t rule out that there may come a time when that will change.

“Unfortunately,” he says, “in Germany a trainer is not allowed to have two different bases and so I can’t have a stable in France as well as one in Germany.”

This has been an excellent year for the stable, but, of course, a difficult one too, and the number of wins is down from the last two seasons as is the prize-money won.

“The spring was very difficult,” he agrees, “particularly as we didn’t know when we were going to start racing again. It is difficult to prepare horses if you don’t know if they are going to race in four weeks, eight weeks or perhaps not at all until next year.

"We just didn’t know, but we did manage to win three Group races on the first two days racing.” The difficult year did produce some positives for the future. In Germany for the first time racing was shown live free to view on the German Racing website.

“I had been arguing for this for some time,” Grewe adds. “Beforehand you had to subscribe and the images looked as if they came from the 1980s. Now everyone can watch German racing live from anywhere in the world and the broadcasts are of a high standard.”

If Grewe is cautiously optimistic about German racing he is most at ease speaking about his own horses.

For 2021 he will have Wonderful Moon and Suuny Queen to take on the best older horses in Europe, and amongst his two-year-olds of 2020 he speaks particularly highly of Noble Heidi, the Isfahan filly Isfahani and, of his colts, the Soldier Hollow colt Virginia Storm and Sisfahan, a son of Isfahan who broke his maiden in Lyon in November. There is also the Pastorius colt Django Unchained, who was second in the Criterium de la Vente d’Octobre Arqana (the Arqana October sales race) on Arc weekend.

If the recent past is a guide, this batch are likely to be winning Group races, both in Germany and further afield.