UMUT ODEMISLIOGLU LOOKED AROUND his barn and saw a horse with no name.
The young stablehand had just returned to Sydney in mid-2013. He had been visiting his mother in Turkey, and was going back to work at Waller’s stables.
Odemislioglu had taken a long and circuitous route to end up with Waller. He grew up around horses in Turkey, the grandson of a breeder, but dreamed of being in the movies. He studied theatre for two years, but switched to a horse-training course at the University of Istanbul, which led to work as an assistant trainer.
Unknown to many Australians, Turkey has an entrenched racing culture. It’s not quite as prevalent as in Australia, where in 1834 politician and writer Reverend John Dunmore Lang tellingly wrote: ‘The three never-failing accompaniments of advancing civilisation are a racecourse, a public house and a gaol.’1 But an equally salient quote about the importance of the sport to Turkey comes from no less a source than the post-Ottoman nation’s father figure, turf enthusiast Kemal Ataturk, who declared: ‘Horse racing is a social need for modern societies.’
Odemislioglu saw the need for advancement through travel, and worked on a stud farm in Ireland for a year, breaking and preparing yearlings for sales. Then — remarkably like Bowman’s wife, Christine, he made a fateful decision to take the trip from Ireland to Australia. Arriving in 2006, he worked on a stud farm, then spent several years with another Rosehill trainer, Tim Martin, before switching to Waller in 2011.
He became a barn foreman, in charge of around twenty horses, with seven in his personal care. Working for Waller, he’d had some good ones, though he’d never strapped a Group 1 winner. But on this, his return to Sydney, the thirty-year-old’s life was about to take a dramatic upward turn.
Looking around, Odemislioglu found a new horse in his barn, in box 101. She was small, unraced and unnamed. But something about her nature — calmness, quietness, intelligence, or perhaps a mix of all three — drew him to her.
‘She didn’t know how to use her energy. She was a bit fresh. She was a very small and immature horse, but something took me to her,’ Odemislioglu would later recall.2
‘She had no name, and we don’t usually pick horses when they have no name, but I asked if I could look after this horse.
‘I was told, “No one else has asked for her, so go for it.”’3
The filly soon had a name, which would become one of the most famous in racing.
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While the Waller–Bowman combination is the best-known force guiding Winx, there’s a team behind her that also deserves credit for how she is prepared. Odemislioglu is at its head, as the mare’s strapper from day one. The bond between the two is immense and plain to see. As Peter Tighe once said, ‘She’s his current girlfriend.’4
‘There is a horse-racing god, I reckon,’ the strapper said with a smile. ‘This is what we all dream about, but we don’t think we’ll get it. It’s like the lotto. I won’t find a horse like this again.’5
Because of the involvement of the once-aspiring actor — who compares Winx to Angelina Jolie as they’re both ‘box-office superstars’ — Australia’s horse has also become news in Turkey.
‘My cousins brag a bit and the Jockey Club of Turkey are very interested in this,’ says Odemislioglu, who sends photos of his grand Winx adventure back to his mother, Meltem.6
Winx has a second strapper caring for her on a daily basis in Candice Persijn, who studied equine science with the University of Queensland before joining Waller in 2014. Ben Cadden performs much of the mare’s trackwork riding and recovery riding, such as when she’s at the beach for a recuperative saltwater soak for her legs, a routine for many racehorses. Other support crew such as Jason Brettle, Waller’s farrier, and Doug Hill, the truck driver who takes her to the races, also gain mention on a website set up by Winx’s owners: winxhorse.com.au. The site was created partly to enshrine Winx’s career for posterity, in a way not possible in the days of Phar Lap, of whom precious little footage remains. It’s also to recognise the team effort that goes into Winx.
‘What we’ve done is make sure that all the people who are looking after the horse . . . are recognised and show them appreciation for what they do,’ Peter Tighe said. ‘It’s not all about the trainer and the jockey and it’s certainly not all about the owners. It’s more about the kids behind the scenes who love the horse to bits. Those kids are there all the time. We certainly appreciate what they do, big time.’7
While Waller is a hands-on trainer, as much as he can be considering the number of horses he has, the backroom staff such as Odemislioglu and Persijn are most responsible for putting Winx through her daily routines at the stable: the feeding, the grooming, the hosing-down, all of which surround trackwork — horses’ pre-dawn practice runs. (While training regimens vary, horses preparing for Saturday races will usually gallop fast on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, in a typical range of between 800 and 1600 metres, starting at less than full pace before finishing strongly in the last 600 or 400 metres. Other days are for lighter exercise, perhaps swimming, walking or time on the treadmill.)
As for the man at the helm, Tighe says he, Kepitis and Treweeke are not just thankful for, but in awe of the job Waller performs. Though there is now a more intense focus on Winx from the world outside his Rosehill stable, Waller still has a few hundred other horses on his books, around a hundred in work at any time to keep an eye on. While Winx is the headline grabber, the Tighes themselves have some forty horses with him in total. Tighe says he has complete faith in how Waller handles them, despite the growing pressures of training Winx.
‘We have an interest in forty to forty-five horses,’ he said. ‘He manages all of those. We entrust him with that and he provides a very good service. That’s why I am there with him.
‘It’s a business and he never loses sight of that fact and he makes the calls accordingly. It’s no good me getting involved. I’m good at selling fruit and vegetables, but not training horses.
‘He doesn’t tell me what price I should be paying for mangoes, and I don’t ring him and tell him what track to run on and what jockey to put on or who should be looking after the horse.
‘How do you tell someone who is the best in the world what to do?’8