David Hayes - Australian Horse Trainer

Australian horse trainer David Hayes seemingly has avoided the pitfalls often associated with trying to follow in the footsteps of a famous parent.

His father, Colin Hayes, set a standard that has had few to equal or surpass it, but David appears to be doing just that, and he still has time on the clock. At the age of 49, it would seem that, barring some unforeseen misfortune, he still has many years of productivity ahead of him.

After spending time under his father's wing, David took over the Lindsay Park operation in 1990 at the start of the 1990 - 91 season. He wasted no time getting up to speed, pulling off a W. S. Cox Plate when Better Loosen Up ran 2:01.5 with M. Clarke steering, the fastest time ever since the adoption of the metric system in 1972 and also since the current 2040 m distance was established in 1986.

That first season for Hayes included six Group 1 winners on one day at Flemington, on Derby Day, and a win of the Japan Cup the following month.

Perhaps to prove himself no flash in the pan, he has two Caulfield Cups to his credit that span 13 years. The first came in 1993 courtesy of Fraar and the second in 2006 with Tawqueet taking the victory.

Hayes added the Melbourne Cup to his resume in 1994, when Jeune carried Wayne Harris to the winning post. David needs one more Cup to equal his father's record before he can set his sights on Lee Freedman or Bart Cummings's marks.

While he may be somewhat lacking in the Melbourne Cups department, Hayes has established a record that neither Mr. Cummings or Mr. Freedman can claim: he brought home a Commonwealth record 300 wins in one season.

David spent a 10 year stint from 1996 to 2005 training in Hong Kong, winning two premierships, finishing no worse than fourth the entire time, bringing in almost 500 winners and producing a staggering $400,000,000+ dollars in prize money.

He has added numerous domestic premierships to complement his foreign ones. He also made an attempt in 2007 to have the first Australian bred/trained winner since Phar Lap in 1932's Aqua Caliente Handicap to win a Group 1 race in North America when he took Anamato to run in the American Oaks in California.

Hayes has a well-deserved reputation for training young thoroughbreds, so much so, in fact, that he is affectionately known as "King of the Kids." He won the Golden Slipper Stakes in 2005 with Miss Finland, and added to that with five Blue Diamond Stakes in 1991, 1995, 2006, 2007 and 2008.

His Group 1 race record stands at over 50 and counting to this point in time.

Hayes has many other remarkable statistics, but since the final chapter in his career has yet to be written, any more listing here would make this brief biography obsolete in short fashion.

Suffice it to say that David Hayes induction into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame in 2008, an honour usually afforded to those either dead or retired, was well-deserved recognition from his peers, but only time will tell what records may be rewritten before he calls it a day.

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