Celebrity Featured: David Hayes
About David Hayes
David Hayes took over the trainer's role at the famed Lindsay Park, Angaston, South Australia, at the start of the new racing season in August 1, 1990. He trained a winner, So Surprising, with his first runner at Gawler on that day. Under David's control, Lindsay Park moved into another period of dominance in Australian Racing. In the five years David trained in Australia he won every trainers' premiership in Adelaide and Victoria.
It was a former Les Theodore and Bart Cummings trained gelding named Better Loosen Up that really launched Hayes' career, claiming the young trainers' first Group 1 in winning the 1990 Cox Plate at Moonee Valley. Five weeks later Better Loosen Up took the racing world by storm, winning the 1990 Japan Cup in Tokyo – the first and only Australian trained horse to win the famous race. Between those two incredible wins, Hayes set a world-record winning six Group races on Derby Day at Flemington.
In the 1991–92 season, Hayes became the first trainer in Australia to win 300 races in a season when Baja California won the Doutta Gala Hurdle at Moonee Valley on July 12. He finished the season with a record 306 winners (the current record is 334 wins, set by John Hawkes in 2001–2002). In 1994, Hayes trained his Melbourne Cup winner, important galloper Jeune, emulating his father who won the race twice. They join Jim and Bart Cummings as the only father-son combinations to train a Melbourne Cup winner.