Bennett buzzing after Classic quinella

Cover image courtesy of Fenwick Farm

There are many stages a horse must go through from the time it is born until the day it hits the racetrack but arguably the most important step is the process of breaking in.

The breaking in period is where the horse learns the tools to set it up for the rest of its career and Greg Bennett, the Head Trainer at Fenwick Farm was responsible for that early education of the first two runners home in Saturday’s R. Listed Magic Millions 2YO Classic.

This time last year, both Shaquero (Shalaa {Ire}) and Alpine Edge (Better Than Ready) had graduated the Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale and arrived at Fenwick Farm to begin the road to becoming racehorses.

With two full days to process the result, Bennett was delighted to see two horses of which he and his team laid the foundations of, return to the Gold Coast and quinella the $2 million feature for 2-year-olds.

“That’s why we get up and go to work every day, just to try and get results and try and find a good horse,” Bennett told TDN AusNZ.

“I was training racehorses for years but now I’m back breaking them in and pre-training and I love this end of the industry, where we’re just taking the babies and starting them off in their careers. To see a couple come through like that, it’s just so good.

“It’s very humbling and it’s very pleasing and we all love our horses and staff and we all get a fuzzy feeling when things go right because as we all know, there are so many disappointments in this industry, probably more so than there are excitements and for that to happen, it was unbelievable.”

The personal feeling of satisfaction to produce a result of that calibre in a race so many connections are targeting their horses towards is one thing, but Bennett said it was also a great advertisement for the Fenwick Farm operation.

“Results speak for themselves and I started up here three years ago on my own and then over the last 18 months we’ve morphed into Fenwick Farm with some new investors and some good people around us,” he said.

“We’ve upped the ante a little bit on what we can offer and without showing off, none of us want to show off, but it’s just a wonderful way of letting people know that we’re out here and this is what we can do.”

Standouts of the crop

Bennett said he had 220 yearlings come through his operation last year but Shaquero and Alpine Edge, at the time just two colts by Shalaa (Ire) and Better Than Ready, put their hand up from the start as two standouts of the crop.

“I’m 62-years-old and I’ve been doing it for a long, long time, I’ve lost count of how many thousands of horses I’ve broken in but the good ones stand up, the good ones tell you, they announce their arrival pretty quickly and I’ve learnt to read the signs,” Bennett said.

“Without exciting people too much, you don’t want to go over the top with your praise because then people will be disappointed, but those two probably got an eight out of 10.

“I very rarely hand out a 10 out of 10, there’s probably only two horses in my entire life that I’ve handed out a 10 out of 10 to and they were Makybe Diva and All Silent and Typhoon Tracy rated highly as well, but there’s plenty that rate very low on the scale.

“Two years' ago we broke in Eleven Eleven and we also did in that same crop a lovely filly of Gerald Ryan’s called Vilami and I tipped them early and told those owners that they’ve got something about them. They’re beautiful, they’re strong, they’re intelligent and they’ve got a great attitude and they cover the ground and then once we’ve done that it’s up to the trainers."

Bennett acknowledges that the breaking in progress is a crucial part of the horse’s career but there is a lot of work that must be done by the trainers and their staff once they move on, and so he credited Chris Waller and Toby and Trent Edmonds and their respective teams for presenting Shaquero and Alpine Edge in impeccable order on Saturday.

“All the accolades then go to the trainers and rightly so. Chris Waller and his crew up here and Toby and Trent Edmonds and their crew, they’re the ones that have got them to the races. We help start them and educate them and gave them an opinion.

“I started those two colts this time last year, so there has been 12 months work go into them to get them to this point.

“A lot of credit has got to go to the trainers and their staff and everybody involved.”

Guiding factors

Bennett doesn’t get to see his breakers hit top speed on the track and so to determine their ability, he is guided by a range of other factors.

“Speed comes later and to get to the speed you need to build a foundation and all of that comes from the way they carry themselves,” Bennett said. “You can feel the strength in a young horse and their length of stride and how comfortable they are on the ground.

“If they’re going around like a double-decker bus with three wheels, they’re not going to make it. That action is never going to change, they’re born with that.”

Horses come into Bennett’s system for 30 days at a time, however, many horses will come through multiple times and learn a bit more each time.

“We start them off on a 30-day program but they’re not going to learn everything in 30 days that’s going to set them up for the rest of their life so a lot of them I take through three or four times.

“Both of those horses (Shaquero and Alpine Edge) came back to us twice after we initially broke them in, and then they went off to Toby (Edmonds) and Chris (Waller).

“In those ensuing periods, we build on what we’ve taught them and every time they come in we show them a bit more. We get them up cantering, we get them doing a bit of half-pace. I’ve got very experienced trackwork riders that take them over after myself.

“We get a feel of them and we say ‘look, we really like these ones’. The trackwork riders can feel the motor and they’ve got gears.

“It’s like driving a speed boat, you push the throttle forward and they lift up and travel forward and you pull the throttle back and it sinks back into the water. These horses have gears, they don’t just want to charge.

“You can settle them and control the speed and control the strength and you learn to understand that and look for that in a young horse.

“The fastest we get them going is probably half-pace and then when they leave the barriers, they don’t start to jump-out properly until they’re with the trainers. We build them up so they can get out of the gates at about half-pace and go for 200 yards and that’s it.

“If you go too hard too soon with those babies out of the gates, you turn them into barrier rogues. They start wanting to not go in, they start predicting and preempting what’s going to happen, they get over excited, if they get nervous they get stressed and then they start playing up.

“So all of that has got to come later and that’s the trainer’s job, but we have to set the foundation and that’s the exciting part about what we do.”

First impressions

When asked about his first impressions of Shaquero and Alpine Edge when they first arrived at the property, Bennett said they were very different, but the one thing he liked about both of them is the sire they came from.

“First impressions are amazing with yearlings and we all know what we like to look for so immediately they took our eye as types, they were beautiful types.

“I’ve had a lot to do with Better That Readys over the years. Kelly Schweida trained Better Than Ready and he was a great horse and he is great advertisement for Queensland racing and breeding.

“Alpine Edge was a lovely type, he had a beautiful temperament. Peter Foster who bred the horse did a great job preparing him and he arrived to us in great order and that made the job a lot easier.

“Even though he had a lot more pressure put on him in different ways through the sale prep, he was a beautiful horse with a lovely, big, powerful length of stride and nothing bothered him.

“Shaquero on the other hand, he was a lot more highly strung and a lot more nervous energy to start with.

“It took a while for him to really settle in but we got a few Shalaas and we all just said ‘gee these are nice horses’.

“That was the first crop of them, they just felt big, strong and powerful but intelligent, and they had that feeling of just power and sensibility.

“I actually even rang John or Paul Messara and said ‘these Shalaas are going to be good’ and they, of course, said, ‘well, we hope so, that’s why we bought him’.

“All the Shalaas we did that year were very good. I think I’ve got another seven here at the moment to start on in the next few days. They’re all lovely types with lovely temperaments and they float over the ground and that’s what I like to see in a young horse.”

The new class

With the 2021 Magic Millions Gold Coast Yearling Sale wrapping up on Tuesday, Bennett is already welcoming his new class of yearlings to break in and is hoping one of them can live up to their 2020 predecessors.

“We’ve got about 25 here already and about 60 have gone to the paddock,” Bennett said. “We share a lot of our business and do all our spelling out at Newington Farm and Crisp’s Creek, so a lot of the yearlings have gone over there to go into the paddock for a month to five weeks.

“I’ll sit down with the trainers and owners and spelling farms and we’ll put them in order of how important they are to get broken in as soon as possible, so some of them have started and some of them we might leave for three to four weeks and some we might leave for six or eight weeks.

“We just put them in an order of the most precocious, the biggest and the strongest and we’ll do them first and then we leave the weaker ones and the smaller ones to a bit later.

“We’ve got our work cut out now for the next three or four months. The Classic Sale is coming up and then we’ve got the Easter Sale and then the Sale in June so it never ends. Our year is now mapped out for the next 10 to 11 months.”