TOP STABLE EXPANDING ITS FOOTPRINT

By Graham Potter | Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Queensland’s top trainer, Tony Gollan, is in the process of expanding his stable’s already significant footprint, confirming the establishment of a second training base at the Gold Coast.

This stable expansion is seen as a natural progression by Gollan, who has won eleven straight Brisbane Trainers’ Premierships.

“We’ll have roughly ninety stables at Eagle Farm plus around sixty at the Gold Coast,” said Gollan.

“We would certainly have liked them all to be at Brisbane, where we are ... but that just wasn’t an option.

“The Gold Coast training centre has had a lot of renovations going on the last few years ... and has lights going in etc, so once that was all finalised, we started looking at options at the Gold Coast ... which is a really good training centre and racing precinct ... and these stables came about.

“We’ve had ten horses down there for a little while already ... the stables at the back of Gillian Heinrich’s place, which we are grateful for,” continued Gollan.

“It’s been a bit of a slow start to get into our own new stables. They are vacated now. They just need to be cleaned up and some repairs need to be done there. Once all of the fixes are done, we’ll start to move in.

“It will be a bit of a staggered move. As we get staff and more senior staff we’ll build the numbers up to capacity.

“We hadn’t been able to advertise for any staff until now, because we didn’t know what the start date was going to be, so it’s been pretty tricky.

“We’ve had a few staff down there already and they have been great and the horses coming from Brisbane have been brilliant, so, it has been good ... but it has also been frustrating.

“Now we have got a better idea of when we can get in. Hopefully it’s only in a few weeks’ time now so we can start advertising for staff.

‘The important thing is you have got to get the right structures around your horses. It’s no good having fifty or sixty horses there and not having the right people and the right number of people in place, so we’ll just the build the horse numbers up according to how that detail falls into place.”

In essence, this is adding another string to Gollan’s bow and to that of a stable which sets its own standards and targets.

Last season Gollan saddled 147 Metropolitan winners to take out his latest Brisbane Trainer’s Premiership by ... wait for it ... 83 winners. That was the fourth time his stable had gone past the 100 winner mark in a season, and that total of 147 beat his previous best of 140.5 winners in the 2022/23 season where he won the Premiership by 74.5 winners.

It has all been an upward trajectory for the stable for a long period of time and opening a second training base at the Gold Coast is likely only going to cement the level of absolute superiority he has established in the Queensland training ranks.

It is only two weeks into the new racing season and Gollan already sits on top of the Brisbane Trainer’s Premiership ladder.

While some things may change, others stay the same!

Tony Gollan