Newnham a great advertisement for on-the-job training
With a code of ethics cry regarding racehorse trainers being renewed due to the Aquanita debacle still on the bubble following the Darren Weir disaster, Mark Newnham is a white knight.
Newnham takes on The Autumn Sun – one of Chris Waller’s invading horde and a red-hot favourite in the Randwick Guineas on Saturday – with a filly, Nakeeta Jane, successful in the group 1 Surround Stakes last Saturday.
Sure, it’s a prime time for up-and-comers in the training ranks, with James Cummings keeping the family name flying under the Godolphin blue in a caper where once experience, usually old and wizened, was prized.
“If you look at the culture of Australian training – it is horrific,” Terry Henderson, an owner of substance under the OTI Racing and Bloodstock banner with credits of most of the world’s major centres, stressed in Moods: The Peter Moody Saga, by Helen Thomas.
In relation to Moody after the cobalt fiasco, Henderson told Thomas: " . . . he’s undergone not one ounce of formal training. He’s undergone no process whatsoever, and yet he’s got the ability to go out there and do it. There is no other profession I know– and training is a very complex profession – when someone can take those sorts of leaps in their operation without any skillset being
required to do it . . . it is so different from what we see in other parts of the world.”
Henderson believes all Australian trainers should be required to study for the job as they do in Europe: “In Europe you become a trainer after you’ve been an assistant to someone . . . it’s usually for two years . . . where are the professional ethics in the industry? Where is the code of conduct any professional has? These guys are running multi-billion dollar businesses off the back of ignorance, in many cases.”
Historically UK trainers, not Irish, don’t rate with Australians. Apart from Charles Appleby, who has made a dint on our turf, Paul Perry led the modern charge on Royal Ascot with Choisir in 2003, continued by others, including Moody, an outstanding turf achiever, with Black Caviar.
Go back and note Stanley Wotton, the Aussie trainer and breeder who ended up with the major slice of Epsom Downs and donated it back to the nation.
Of course, it’s a different world. Certainly a written code of ethics for trainers would have once been dispatched by them 25 years back to the nearest dunny.
However, when Henderson made the point again recently during ABC News Radio’s Hoof On The Till, James Cummings said he would gladly sign.
Cummings had a wonderful grounding from the famous family but Newnham, a youthful 51, came through a more demanding education.
By a New Zealand sire, John Newnham, a former Sydney Morning Herald sporting editor more adept with a golf club than reins, Mark’s dam, Joan, is a daughter of Bert Condon, an old-time jockey, and there is also Bert Bryant, the great race caller, in her bloodline.
Mark Newnham left school, Holy Cross at Ryde, when he was 15 and a top 10 student. He was given special exemption to depart so young because the head master reckoned it was rare for a boy of his age to have decided on a career.
He then came under the guidance of Bart Cummings and Bob Thomsen learning the trade, not only in the saddle but on ground level. He looked after the outstanding sprinter Campaign King in 1988 for two months in Brisbane when he won the Stradbroke.
Mark Newnham has had the best possible racing education, the worth of which is now being emphasised.
Later, Newnham graduated to major track rider, where his opinion was prized, and also a jockey for Gai Waterhouse, but he was always going to peak as a trainer.
To me “assistant trainer” is a label. Mark Newnham has had the best possible racing education, the worth of which is now being emphasised.
Newnham rode Nakeeta Jane on Wednesday at Warwick Farm to convince himself that she was ready to back up after last Saturday and liked what he felt.
A funeral service will be held for Les Carlyon at Flemington racecourse on Tuesday, starting from 12 noon.