David Defied the Doctor

The Informant & Des Coppins reports:

Four years ago, Te Akau principal David Ellis had a life-threatening illness and the doctor told him to slow down and cut his workload by half. But he was having none of it.

“I told my wife Karyn to take no notice of that doctor,” he said in our radio chat on Monday.

“When I got out of there I'd be back to doing what I love, and I intended to put as much effort as I could to increase our syndicate awareness and buy more yearlings and in fact go to another level.”

So far this year David has purchased 36 yearlings, mainly from Karaka but a few from overseas too, and the ownership tally keeps growing.

Last Saturday the Derby win by Gingernuts capped an epic three decades for the founder of the Te Akau operation, which has been syndicating yearlings and racehorses for the last 30 years.
Te Akau have now won all the Group One classics in New Zealand, which includes five 2000 Guineas, four 1000 Guineas, the New Zealand Oaks and now the New Zealand Derby.

David recalled how he purchased just two horses at the Ready to Run Sale in November 2015 - Hall Of Fame and Gingernuts - and both have won at Group One level.

The only difference was that Hall Of Fame was all sold basically overnight but Gingernuts, on the other hand, took almost two months to complete the full ownership.

“There's never any rhyme or reason why this happens at times,” he said.

“I had a quality mare called Integrate who won just on $700,000 and was placed at Group One level eight times and she, too, was a slow seller. She took six months to fill.”

While the stable knew Gingernuts was certainly well above average, the rapid rise he's made in the last month is beyond Ellis's wildest dreams.

"If I told you he would be the Derby winner after he ran fourth in his first race of the season in a Rating 65 race at Stratford on New Year's Eve, you'd be saying what's this bloke on?

“But after his terrific Avondale Guineas win, we knew we had something special because Guineas wins never happen the way he did it.

“He wasn't nominated for the Derby, but it was something of a no-brainer to pay the late fee, and as it's turned out that certainly was money well spent by the syndicate.”

And what a great bunch of owners we all witnessed after the win. They clamoured over the birdcage fences to congratulate each other, wearing their conspicuous “G-Nuts” caps.

“That sort of excitement money can't buy,” said Ellis. “Some of them may only have a very small percentage in the ownership, but at the end of the day all of Gingernuts belongs to each of them and percentages don't come into it.”

All told, Te Akau have now won 40 Group One races and 170 at black-type level.

The Te Akau principal's first Group One win was with the Bill Ford-trained Cosmetique in the Easter Handicap at Ellerslie in 1986. That was less than five years after Te Akau's senior training partner and former jockey Stephen Autridge had the worst day of his life when his mount, the hot Derby favourite Altitude, haemorrhaged and died in the classic.

Altitude, a superstar and an unbeaten three-year-old prior to that tragedy, was also trained by Bill Ford.

Like David Ellis, Stephen Autridge rates Saturday's win as the highlight of his career, as he reflected on Radio Trackside earlier this week.

“I remember Bill Ford's wife Dawn comforting me after Altitude's demise and saying, ‘Don't worry Stephen, one day you'll get that Derby.'

“It's the race I've been after for years - first as a jockey and in the last 25 years or more as a trainer. No other race on the calendar meant as much to me as the Derby.”

And that's why a few tears were shed and Stephen became more than a little choked up after he clinched the win.

It would be fair to say that the Derby for Stephen was just as much for the racing people in Altitude's era as it was for all those around him today!