A LADY AND A CHAMP:
Racing legend Gai Waterhouse and her daughter, Kate, invite Genevieve Gannon onto the family farm to talk about success, style and why family will always come irst.
Racing royalty Gai Waterhouse and her daughter, Kate
Gai Waterhouse is drinking tea from a dainty cup with a gold trim as she oversees the symphony of activity in her NSW farm homestead. There’s the percussion of tiny feet in pink suede Mary Janes as granddaughters Sophia, four, and Grace, two, run around the dining room table, the clippety-clap of make-up containers being ipped open and shut as colour is applied to daughter Kate’s eyelids, and a general hubbub as staff employed by the Waterhouses and The Women’s Weekly work to squeeze a photoshoot into Gai’s busy schedule. The legendary horse trainer has to be on a ight at 11. But right now her main concern is that everybody present is warm and well fed. The Alpine sky may be a beautiful spring-time blue, but there’s a chill the wood re is doing little to dispel. “Make sure you get something to eat,” Gai calls to each crew member by name. “A woman can’t live on toast alone.”
Gai starts her day at 2.15am with a breakfast of fruit before eating a second cooked breakfast later in the morning after pre-dawn track work. She values hard work and has been richly rewarded for her fortitude in a cutthroat industry. “It’s tough. But you’ve got to stick to your guns,” she says.
Over the course of a year, she’ll train about 150 horses, preparing them for their races with a routine based on the principals of balance and momentum. She likens her work to being the mistress of a small school and her love for her pupils is evident. Colourful canvasses of racetrack scenes
“I’d found the niche. I think I believed in myself enough to do the job well.”
hang on the walls, while equine sculptures decorate the garden beds and manicured grass of the farm, Fiorente, which sits atop a gentle hill about an hour and half out of Sydney. The property is named for the Irish thoroughbred Gai led to victory in the 2013 Melbourne Cup. It is just one of many achievements that places her as Australia’s third most successful horse trainer of all time. She is only outranked by Bart Cummings and her father, Tommy “T.J.” Smith, whose careful tutelage helped shape Gai’s future.
Gai will have another tilt at the world’s richest horserace this coming November, in the spring racing carnival that daughter Kate will cover for Channel Seven. Speaking excitedly about her upcoming hosting role, Kate describes how integral horseracing has been to the family. The fashion blogger and columnist has long been connected to the stylish side of racing, while brother Tom and father Robbie are bookmakers. “Some days we’d go to the races and the whole family would be there in some working capacity but we’d never cross paths,” Kate says.
When Kate steps in front of the camera this spring, she will be reprising a role Gai played early in her career. Gai met her husband, Robbie, when she hosted a racing television show, and her request to interview trainer Bill Waterhouse was met with the reply: “I’m too busy but
I’ve got a handsome son.”
“Mum’s always been a role model for me,” Kate says. “Since I was little, people would always say: ‘Are you going to be a trainer? Are you going to follow in your mother’s footsteps?’ In some ways I did.”
Given her pedigree and connections, Gai’s success may appear to be fait accompli. But nothing could be further from the truth. Gai had to ght just to get her licence, and de ed her own father who ordered her to stand down when the Australian Jockey Club (AJC) tried to block her from becoming a trainer.
The year was 1989. Gai had two small children and had been learning her father’s business for more than a decade. As a young woman, she left Australia to work as an actress and model in Europe, then returned home in 1977 to join her father at his Tulloch Lodge stables adjacent to Sydney’s Randwick racecourse. She was still a working actress, having signed with celebrity agent Harry M. Miller, and appeared in The Young Doctors and Crown Matrimonial, but her apprenticeship under her father eclipsed her work on screen.
“The more I did it the more I wanted to do it,” she says. “I had a burning passion. I’d found the niche. I think I believe enough in myself enough to do it well.”
The legendary T.J. had been the one to introduce Gai to the world of horseracing, but when Gai announced she wanted to follow in his footsteps and become a trainer, he was against it. “He said, ‘Gai, it’s a really hard life. I wouldn’t recommend it. I just think there are too many downfalls.’ I think he was hoping I’d get married and then whatever, but I was absolutely hell-bent on it.”
The climax came when Gai stormed out of a Double Bay restaurant after going three rounds with her father over dinner. The next morning, T.J. called Gai and said, “If you’re going to be a trainer, you have to be the best”. But her battle was only just beginning. In the mid-1980s, Robbie, then a bookmaker, had been warned off Australian racetracks for his knowledge of the Fine Cotton saga – a betting scandal in which one racehorse was replaced by another, faster runner, who had been painted with hair-dye and house paint to help sell the ruse. When Gai applied for her licence, her application was rejected.
“I applied, only to be knocked back, and then they wrote to me and said it was because of being married to [Robbie].”
Gai was frustrated and angry, but wouldn’t back down. She took the AJC to court, “much to my father’s dismay and disappointment,” she adds. T.J. was against his daughter taking on the racing establishment, made up of his friends and business associates. “It was rocking the boat and he didn’t want me to do that,” Gai says.
The rst time Gai took on the AJC, she lost. “I went again and I won on appeal,” she says. The victory was short-lived. The AJC announced it was going to ght to have the appeal victory overturned. Gai swore she would take the matter all the way to the High Court if she had to. Over two years, she waged war with the AJC. It wasn’t just her father who tried to discourage her from the battle, the public weighed in too.
“As soon as you appear in the media, people think, ‘what’s this trumped up little so-and-so? Why is she doing this, why doesn’t she cop it on the chin? The authorities don’t think she should have the licence. Why is she going on?’” Gai says. “But I knew that unless I agitated and kept at them I would never get the licence.”
Gai dug in her heels. “They called me in one day and they said if you drop the case, we will give you the licence … If I was a man there would never have been a discussion. There wouldn’t have been a problem in the world and they knew it.”
Gai’s courage and ultimate victory precipitated legislation that changed the landscape for all Australian working women. An act of parliament, called The Waterhouse Act, now ensures that women will never be judged on the deeds of their husbands. “I’m very proud of that,” says Gai.
The main room at Fiorente is like Gai herself – grand and welcoming. Dressed in a belted, tan leather trench, cinched at the waist, she offers around homemade biscuits, and retrieves a pot of pawpaw ointment for anyone whose lips were chapped by the biting wind. Between out t changes, she confers with staff via a wireless headset. She is a virtuoso. Kate says Gai’s determination to balance her career with her devotion to her family has always been something she has hoped to emulate.
“Looking back, I’m in awe that she could do that while having small kids,” Kate says. “She’s always given us lots of advice and been really supportive. Family always comes rst for my mum and she’s instilled that in me as well.”
Some of Kate’s earliest memories are of watching Gai dress for the races on a Saturday, then playing with her hats, dresses and jewellery. This taste for fashion can be attributed to the in uence of Gai’s mother, Valerie.
“Valerie had great style. She really cut a dash and she had beautiful taste with clothes,”
Gai says. “I love clothes and I love dressing for the occasion.”
Valerie’s sensibility for style is something Gai has been proud to see Kate explore. “She’s very creative, and she sees things a little bit outside the ordinary,” she says.
Asked if Kate is likely to follow the same path as Gai and swap racing journalism for training, Gai laughs, and says no, Kate is “too smart for that”. But she’s con dent her daughter will continue the family tradition of forging new pathways in the pursuit of excellence.
“You don’t know what you can’t do until you try it,” Gai says. “You don’t know your limitations so you try.” AWW
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“Family always comes rst for my mum and she’s instilled that in me.”