BROWNIE'S BLOG: TRAINING PARTNERSHIPS ARE A GROWING TREND AND AN INTERESTING DYNAMIC

By Damian Browne | Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Brownie’s Blog is the weekly personal blog of multiple Group 1 winning jockey Damian Browne which appears exclusively on HRO. This week Brownie comments on the rise in numbers of training partnerships and the new dynamic that can create in a stable. He also comments on his possible future interest in training and, last but not least, he gives his congratulations to a trainer who has gone where few, if any, have gone before.

Training partnerships does seem to be a growing trend and, in many ways, it is quite understandable why that is the way things are going.

Teams are getting bigger than they were ten or twenty years ago. People are talking about stables of a hundred plus horses now. Years ago, there would only have been a handful of trainers who had those numbers.

A partnership obviously does help share the trainer’s workload, particularly in respect of the fact that we have racing virtually every day and they never get a day off … as trainers will often tell you.

It is an interesting dynamic though.

When you are going into a training partnership with somebody, the ideal would be that you both have something different to bring to the table to enhance the stable expertise … but that obviously is going to cause some clashes at some stage.

I suppose it is a matter of having respect for the person you are in partnership with and therefore respecting his or her opinion. Decisions have to be made though and sometimes there would be varying opinions on what to do next.

Does one of the partners lead the way?

I don’t know how they would work that out but you would think that the buck has to stop with somebody in that situation. If that respect is there though, they should be able to work things out, particularly if a game-plan to rule on any standoff of opinion is put in place beforehand.

The advantages are there though, not least if a trainer wanted to go away and spend time with the family for a while, you don’t want to be wandering what is going on at the stables when you are doing that.

That won’t come into play if you have got somebody there who you can rely on and, who, as a partner, will have the same motivation as you to see that all goes well.

So, yeah, partnership numbers are growing and we can expect to see even more of them in the future.

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Have I ever thought about taking up training?

I’ll be honest. I have given it a lot more thought in the last few months than I originally did. I’m sort of missing the horses and being there working with them … so I have thought about it a little bit more but I’m not right there yet.

I would probably be one of those people who would need to go into partnership with somebody because there is a lot in the training side of things that I don’t know.

Like I said before, you’ve got to bring different things to the table to make a partnership work and there are a lot of things I could bring to a partnership that perhaps a trainer hasn’t got … and vise versa.

It would be a nice new challenge for me … maybe sometime in the future.

I certainly wouldn’t rule it out.

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Whatever success any training partnership has they are unlikely to match trainer Barbara Blackie’s massive milestone which she achieved this week.

Blackie celebrated her 100th birthday last weekend and then had a runner at Ashburton on Tuesday.

I remember riding for her many, many years ago in New Zealand. She only ever had a couple of horses. She loves her horses.

I send my congratulations and all of my best wishes to a lovely lady who is an icon around the Riccarton racecourse.