Robert Barrett greets another winner and could soon be leading in his own yard’s winners (Picture: Crawford Racing)
27-year-old Manchester-born Robert Barrett will become South Africa’s newest licensed trainer and starts out at Futura Park with a handful of horses.
The numbers will hopefully be boosted at the forthcoming Sales in Cape Town, where he will be available to be approached by prospective buyers.
Robert wrote his trainers license exam last week having gained a lot of experience in his years since leaving school by spending six months with John Koster at Klawervlei Stud, five years with Mike Stewart at his Noordhoek Beach-based training operation and two years at Futura Park, which consisted of just over a year with Brett Crawford and nearly a year with James Crawford.
Robert’s deep passion for racing all began when watching every Saturday morning, together with his father, Britain’s iconic racing program, the Channel 4 Morning Line, which featured such racing legends as John Francome, John McCirick, Derek “Thommo” Thompson, John Oaksey, Jim McGrath, Lesley Graham etc.
For the rest of the day, if they were not at the races, they would watch all of the live racing on Channel 4, whose signature tune you might find Robert humming to himself even today.
He grew up idolising Frankie Dettori, as well as Manchester City long before their successful era, and wanted to be a jockey himself, but that was never to be as he has grown up into a 6 foot, 90kg adult.
He recalled Frankie’s first Derby win on Authorized and continued to follow British racing with passion when moving to South Africa at the age of eleven.
He completed high school in South Africa but that didn’t stop him following the like of the great Frankel’s career from afar.
Robert’s passion for racing grew to new heights in Cape Town as he was able to see it from an inside angle as his Grandfather owned horses.
His Grandfather’s best horses were the like of Fabiani, a Glen Kotzen-trained Gr 2 Green Point Stakes winner (giving Karis Teetan his first Graded winner) and he also ran in the July and finished third in the L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate to the mighty Pocket Power; Sea Cat, a Listed-winning five-time winner trained by Paul Reeves; and recently he has owned two good Mike Stewart-trained horses, Helen’s Ideal (Listed-winning six-time winner) and Pretty Betty (Gr 3-winning five-time winner).
As a fifteen-year-old Robert used to stay with Paul Reeves and family for a week or two during the school holidays and go to work with him every morning.
He met John Koster through the annual Klawervlei Farm Sale, which his Grandfather always used to attend, and at one of the first he attended John said to him, “When you’ve done school come to the farm and I’ll make you into a horseman.”
Every year John would say, “Have you done school yet?”
Robert said, “So as soon as I had finished school I waited until after Christmas and went straight to Klawervlei.”
“I spent just short of six months there going to all of the big Sales and learning a helluva lot in a short space of time. I always had the idea of going to a racing yard from there and as I lived Noordhoek-side the opportunity arose to spend time with Mike Stewart. I almost started out by just helping out but he then gave me a job and I was with him for five years. I did my qualifications like stable employee and assistant’s etc while with Mike.”
He continued,”I only weighed 70kg when leaving school and Mike said to me one day, ‘If you’re going to be a trainer you will have to learn to ride a horse as well, so he taught me how to ride which was a big plus. I rode plenty of horses work along the beach.”
Mike Stewart is also used by many big yard’s to rehabilitate injured horses because of the sea water being alongside his facility and among those who recuperated with him while Robert was there was Double Superlative. The big horse spent about six months there and went on to win the WSB Met.
Robert said, “You never really get a perfect horse at Mike Stewart’s, you’re either inheriting horses from other trainers with issues or you fixing a horse for someone else before sending it back to them. So this was a fantastic learning curve for me, working with such horses taught me a lot. Mike is a very underrated horseman too, he is a phenomenal horseman.”
He continued, “The time came when I needed to move to a bigger yard, before I went on my own, in order to work with top class horses and see how the big yards operate with big strings etc. Brett wanted me when I told him I wanted to move on and it was all done very quickly.”
Brett’s string had grown to about 150 when Robert joined him in the March after Brett’s first Hollywoodbets Durban July win with Winchester Mansion.
” I was with Brett when Oriental Charm won the July and so it was a fantastic time and I learnt a huge amount from him. I have been with James since Brett moved to Hong Kong. The Futura Park training facilities and tracks are phenomenal as the record of the Snaiths and the Crawfords proves.”
Chasingtherainbow is Robert’s Grandfather’s horse who has followed him from Mike Stewart’s to The Crawfords and will now join his own yard. This Potala Palace gelding won a fine race on Sunday to make it five wins from just 12 starts and Robert reckoned he had the potential to be even better if he learnt better racing manners.”
There are 60 boxes in the yard Robert is moving into.
He is full of nervous excitement and concluded, “It has always been my dream and now it is reality.”
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