Passing the Baton

Words / Trevor Marshallsea

JD Hayes

If JD Hayes had somehow landed in a career not involving thoroughbreds, it might have been carpentry.

As the grandson of Lindsay Park’s founder Colin Hayes, and son of the just as formidable David, JD’s enthusiasm for the turf oozed from every pore.

Teaming with older brother Ben to now continue the empire from the Euroa farm their dad built, the Hayes brothers appreciate their good fortune. But there were obstacles to overcome - particularly the wall around Sha Tin racecourse, as JD grew up in his father’s first Hong Kong stint, from ages nought to 10.

“In Hong Kong, we weren’t allowed to go to the races till we were 18,” says the man rarely called by his full name, James David. “So me, my twin brother Will and Chad Schofield (the future jockey son of rider Glyn Schofield) would build treehouses to be able to look over the fence and watch the racing. That’s where my interest really developed.”

The treehouses didn’t achieve any degree of permanence, certainly not a fraction of the Hayes dynasty’s longevity - but JD’s course for a life in the sport was set early on.

“We were allowed into trackwork,” he says. “I was quite inquisitive, so Dad said I was allowed to ask up to 10 questions a day. I’d use them all up - no doubt more dumb questions than good ones.

“Then every school holidays we’d go to Lindsay Park at Angaston. Dad would run his eye over the place and we’d go riding and build experience in that side of it. Then, when we moved back to Australia, I started riding trackwork at 14 years and nine months - the first day you’re allowed.”

Lindsay Park’s famous founder, Colin, started the empire with his England-inspired Angaston facility, and David built Euroa along similar lines. JD has one main memory of his granddad, who died when he was five, but it doesn’t involve horses.

“The jelly bean trick!” he beams. “He’d hold out his fists and I had to pick which one had the jelly bean. I thought I was a genius! Wasn’t till years later I realised he had one in each.”

Is there a gene for natural born sunniness that can run through a family? Every time you see JD, Ben or David speaking, it looks like they’re about to burst out laughing. Perhaps stars like Dulcify, Better Loosen up, Miss Finland and Mr Brightside will do that to you, although the clan hasn’t been spared tragedy, with David’s trainer brother Peter dying in a plane crash in 2001, two years after Colin’s passing. What’s certain is the founding father’s thirst for work runs through his descendants. Aside from inheriting that - and the Euroa farm upon David’s return to Hong Kong in 2020 - JD and Ben also embraced considerable third-generational pressure when partnering up in June, 2021.

“Yeah, there’s big shoes to fill,” JD says. “CS trained 5,300 winners and is a Hall of Fame trainer. Dad’s got a huge CV, and is also in the Hall of Fame.

“We come from a long lineage of trainers who’ve done successful things. We couldn’t have had a better teacher - Dad’s such a knowledgeable man - and he’s also kindly handed us one of the best training facilities in the world. But Ben and I are just hoping to put one foot in front of the other, work hard, and get the best from our horses. Good luck happens when hard work and opportunities meet.

“With Ben and I, it really is a job-share. There’s no clear boss. We work very well together, bounce ideas off each other. I’m perhaps more on the sourcing bloodstock side and Ben’s more training, but even then it’d be a 55-45 split. But there’s also a strong team behind us.

“Ben and I having that family bond works well. Sometimes, in an argument, the professionalism might go out the window and you can use a few descriptive words you wouldn’t use in another workplace relationship! But there’s no grudges held. We’re good mates.”

Chantelle Jolly

What started as child’s play - plastic horses with their own training regimes being “worked” on the loungeroom floor - has two decades later led to one of Australia’s most potent partnerships, Adelaide’s premier pair of Chantelle Jolly and her father Richard.

Most girls love playing with their mum’s shoes. Chantelle found them a hindrance to be removed, as she mimicked the reallife stable world she’d catch glimpses of through her dad.

“I’d get mum’s shoeboxes, and use them as the stables for my toy horses,” Chantelle says. “I’d get Dad’s old trackwork sheets and go by them, and pretend I was training horses.”

Chantelle was later given a show pony, Billy, and used to saddle and ride him around Richard’s Morphettville stables, often contesting 20-metre races with little brother James on his bike. But it wasn’t certain she’d embed herself in the family business, however, with ex-jockey Richard and his former trainer wife Dianne insisting she explore different pathways.

“Mum and Dad made me go to uni. I studied business for a couple of years but found my heart wasn’t in studying, and felt I might as well follow what the heart wants to do,” says Chantelle, who’d also spent time learning horses with her godfather, Adam White, on work experience at Vinery Stud. “I knew I wanted to work with horses, I just wasn’t sure where.”

A strapper and trackwork rider from her mid-teens, she considered becoming a jockey - until she started dating one. Learning the full ups and downs of that life from Jake Toeroek, still her partner, crystalised her main ambition. She gained her trainer’s licence at 19 - the youngest Australian woman to do so - and prepared two horses from her dad’s stable. At Murray Bridge in 2017, Toeroek steered Watchout Watchout to become her first winner. The couple then rode trackwork for English trainer Ralph Beckett for three months, before Chantelle and Richard’s partnership began in 2018.

“When we returned from England, I was still riding work,” she says, “but I found I’d ride one horse, and that was all well and good, but it meant I’d miss out on what all these other horses were doing. I realised what I loved was being on the ground, working with horses - being with them, and caring for

them. I thrive on getting to know the horses - see how they pull up, see how they are, everything about them - and it helps us train them better as well.” Now 24, and half of the team that last year became the first partnership to win Adelaide’s premiership, Chantelle says she loves working with her Dad, plus James and his twin Lilli. There have been downsides, however.

“I wanted to not just be known as Richard Jolly’s daughter, I really wanted to make my own name,” she says. “Everyone assumes you’re getting a free ride off your dad. I did struggle with that early on, because I do work really hard. I was pretty determined at first to prove people wrong, but now I don’t need to prove anything. I let success be the noise, and the people who know you, know we work hard.

“Dad got the business to where it is, and I’ve come in and we’ve taken it to the next level. We’ve grown, and we’re planning on getting bigger.”

Daughter and dad fulfil complementary roles, which Chantelle says “work together really well”.

“I do a lot of the hands-on work with the horses, and that frees up both of us,” she says. “Partnerships are just the way now, and it makes it so much easier - easier to delegate, and you have four eyes on the horses, not just two.

“We’ve got a pretty cruisey approach to training for our horses, in a way. Some older trainers like to ‘break’ them, break their spirit. But we’re very positive. Horses have their own personalities, likes and dislikes, and you’ve got to train every horse individually, bringing that personality out to get the best out of them.

“I love working with Dad. For me it’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle. I get up each day excited to see the horses, excited to see what our next champion’s going to be.”

Calvin McEvoy

It’s just as well for Calvin McEvoy that not only was Fields Of Omagh unsatisfied with winning just one Cox Plate, he waited three years to take his second.

McEvoy was in third grade when his father Tony first brought home one of racing’s most coveted prizes as trainer of Fields Of Omagh in 2003. “Weight for age” and “Cox Plate” were nebulous terms for the eight-year-old, not nearly as important as “centre-half-forward” and “ruck rover” for a footy-mad boy reared in a region known more for reds than racing, the Barossa Valley.

But when the nine-year-old Fields had his fifth crack at the Plate - becoming its sixth dual winner and the first in non-successive years - Calvin was 11, had a fair grasp of the moment, and shared in his family’s excitement. Not coincidentally, it was also around then his course was inexorably set for a life in training.

While his dad was no longer head trainer at Lindsay Park after David Hayes’ return from Hong Kong, Tony’s role in charge of the empire’s Angaston wing meant FOO and other stars were a common sight around Calvin’s childhood farm.

“There were a stack of really good horses who’d come over and start their preparations at our place,” Calvin says.

“Fields Of Omagh, Miss Finland, All American. It was an exciting time to grow up there, and that sparked my passion from a young age.

“I was at my grandma’s house when Fields won his first Cox Plate. I didn’t really realise the importance of it. But towards the end of primary school I began to realise the significance of everything.”

Calvin was in year 10 when his father kicked off his own training business, in partnership with Wayne Mitchell, in 2011, with bases in Victoria and Angaston.

“I started spending a lot of time at the stables, and felt like a part of the change, and it was a really exciting time,” he says. “The Barossa’s not really a racing place, but all my mates got into racing because of me.”

On completing year 12 through a school-based apprenticeship, which afforded a day a week at the stable, McEvoy worked at Lindsay Park, Euroa for a year, then on preparing yearlings at Coolmore Stud. He then furthered his equine education in a different world of training - with England’s David Simcock, famed for star sprinter Dream Ahead.

“I went there at 20 not knowing anything really, especially about how things were done there,” he recalls. “I was probably a bit young, but it made me learn quickly, and it was good to see things done differently. David was a very shrewd operator and a great teacher. I’d ask questions and he wouldn’t just tell me an answer: he’d make you think about it and try to come up with the answers yourself.”

Having also learnt staff management in two years with Simcock, McEvoy returned to a sublime opportunity - as assistant trainer to his dad, essentially running his Angaston wing.

“The old man was in Melbourne a lot, and with 100 horses it was a great opportunity. I had to make my own mistakes, and learn by doing,” says McEvoy, eventually brought in as co-trainer - confirmed in a surprise announcement by Tony at the SA Racing Awards in 2019 - ahead of the stable’s consolidation into its present Ballarat base.

“It was great having the two states initially, but now we’re together in Ballarat it works really well. There’s a bit less pressure, because we can spread the load a bit.

“We do have our different ideas, and we do have some heated discussions, but with that family link we can speak our mind and move on. He’s probably always been tougher on me than most staff, because I’m his son and he knows I can cop it. He’s the boss, but we do show each other great respect.

“We’ll have some differences of opinion, mostly about placing horses, but a little bit about the training. But I’ve learned most of my stuff from him, and so we train very similarly. Our main thing would be to treat all our horses as individuals, to listen to them, and know you don’t need to over-train them, and to have a great team of people around us too.”

Sam Freedman

It’s lucky the most significant moment - among so many - in his family’s vast racing dynasty didn’t traumatise Sam Freedman away from the game for life.

November 1, 2005. Freedman wasn’t quite the youngest baby on course his uncle Lee nominated as the only person who’d live long enough to see another triple Melbourne Cup winner like Makybe Diva. But he was only nine, and there wasn’t much of him, and as the magnificent mare surged towards the lead entering the straight, the crowd around Sam and his siblings - in Flemington’s car park area while their uncles and father Anthony attended to business - surged with her.

“Dad made a rare point of suggesting we come that day, because we might see something special,” Sam recalls. “And after they came around the home turn in the Cup, everyone where we were rushed over to get closer. I was running, and in all the mayhem, I got knocked over. That’s what I remember most vividly.”

Anthony’s chapter of the Freedman clan were reared at the family’s spelling farm on the Mornington Peninsula, and thus young Sam learnt thoroughbreds by studying some of the best ever, and learning from some gifted horse people.

“My first real racing memory was Mummify’s Caulfield Cup,” says Sam, who was seven for that 2003 edition. “All the horses spelled up on our farm. Mummify is buried there. I used to follow the staff around such as Steve Adams, who still works for us today. I didn’t sacrifice my studies, but I was always very keen on racing.”

Sam has been in partnership with his father since the start of the 202021 season, but still the path wasn’t inevitable. He studied professional communications for a year, “mostly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do” (though it still shows in his role as team talker, beside his famously taciturn dad). And when Sam went to England, it wasn’t for racing but his other sporting interest - cricket.

The former Prahran club all-rounder played semi-professionally in Cambridgeshire. But the fact that was a stone’s throw from Newmarket - and a world or two away from the family stable - combined to confirm his future. Six months at Godolphin’s pre-training operation were followed by 18 with Roger Varian, trainer of such notables as Postponed and Ajman Princess.

“I’d been working in the family stable while at uni in Melbourne,” he says, “but it wasn’t until I stepped away - getting away from the family business, which was important, I think, to just see a different side of it, and work with someone with a blank canvas - that was probably what cemented it.

“It’s very different in England. You have access to completely different facilities there. And definitely, a lot of the things I learnt there I try to implement in our stable.

“Such as with stayers - the old Australian way of starting them off over shorter trips and stepping them up - we’re starting to phase that out. The English are the best trainers of stayers in the world, and they have no issues with kicking them off over 2000 metres. With Australia’s training tracks and short trial structure, it can be difficult to get the work into them, but treadmills - which they use a lot in England - are changing things.”

Sam is perhaps more technologically-minded than his father, such as with heart monitors and eating trackers. But that’s not to say Anthony, who’s spent time in England as well, is wary of them.

“He’s actually very open to a lot of this sort of stuff, though perhaps I’ve been able to bring it to his attention a bit more, and he’s probably not as much in touch with the actual use of some devices as I am,” says Sam.

“We do have our clashes. That’s like any partnership, but perhaps more so when you’re father and son, because you’re happy to be pretty honest with each other. But everything comes from the right place.

“Dad’s very good at knowing when the right time is to discuss things. My mind’s always ticking with work, probably because when you’re young, you’re keen to learn. He’s been an amazing teacher for me, and I’ve learnt nearly everything I know from him.”