RNSW_Oct 21_Col_W

www.racingnsw.com.au Stephanie, Tyler, Nikita and Chris Waller with Channel 7 presenter, Hamish McLachlan PEOPLE 13 “I’ve never worried too much about what races we win apart from having horses running in the best races. My belief is if you have horses running in those races you will win them. “Whether it be Golden Slippers or another Everest, I’m not too fussed if we don’t win one but we have the right team to win them. The next 10 years will be pretty good.” In 2020/21 Waller trained 340½ winners nationwide (169 in Sydney) including 15 Group 1 wins, and horses from his stables earned over $43.5 million in prizemoney. He was inducted into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame in 2018 and is fourth on the all-time Group 1 list. When a twentysomething Chris Waller set up a small stable at Rosehill in 2000 he did it knowing it would be hard work. Could he have imagined then how much that hard work would pay off? “It’s not something I reflect on too much, I certainly did in the early days, but I would never forget those people, when I first arrived, who helped me out and gave me the opportunity to train in Sydney,” he said. “Whether it be from Racing NSW through to owners to people who gave me accommodation and who allowed me to expand at the right time. I’m very appreciative and very grateful for the opportunities I had. “There’s been a lot of steps on the ladder that’s got us to where we are today. “It was pretty straightforward for the first seven or eight years, apart from trying to survive and continuing to improve your name because getting good horses to train the early days was hard. “Winning my first premiership I thought ‘that’s great’, I’ve achieved at a high level and I can just keep doing what I’ve been doing and everything will be easy’. “I quickly learned the expectations were there that you had to constantly perform, constantly be winning big races and the level of criticism started to grow. Only a small population but it’s amazing the amount of small talk that gets listened to. Life after Winx – a masked Chris Waller holds the trophy for the Concorde Stakes »