Ten Metropolitan Premierships in a row … the last when coming home 74.5 winners clear of his nearest rival, has already written Tony Gollan’s absolute, long-standing dominance of the Brisbane trainer ranks into the record books in a manner which is emphasized and rubber-stamped with each passing year.
While his achievements have been lauded at the end of each season, just how Gollan puts those numbers together is an even more revealing story as it underlines the juggernaut stable’s relentless push for winners.
Consider this.
The 2023/24 season is just five weeks old. Gollan’s number of Metropolitan winners already stands at seventeen winners, more than double the number of winners posted by his nearest rival, and more than the number of wins posted by the trainers who sit in fifth to tenth place of the Brisbane Trainer’s Premiership ladder … combined!
The Gollan stable added a four-timer at Eagle Farm yesterday to its string of successes.
Gollan himself is on record as saying he doesn’t set too much store on strike-rates because, being a big stable, he often has multiple runners in a race … a valid point … yet, in spite of that scenario, the Gollan stable currently has a 19.8 percent winning strike-rate, which is a huge number in real terms and one which tells its own success story.
And how about this comparison.
That seventeen-winner haul at this stage is exactly the same metropolitan number that Chris Waller has set since the start of the new season.
Gollan has had 86 starters. Waller 162 … and, in the highly competitive Sydney precinct, Waller is only two winners ahead of the Gai Waterhouse and Adrian Bott training partnership and four winners ahead of the Ciaron Maher and David Eustace team.
It has been a flying start by the Gollan stable, and nobody doubts the fact that Brisbane’s leading trainer will once again make all of the running for this season’s Premiership in which the result will, once again, probably be called long before the last meeting of the season is held.
Part of Gollan’s philosophy is the quest to do better each season.
Beating his own record-breaking total of 140.5 wins last season (in which his strike-rate was 19.9 percent) to satisfy that ambition is not going to be easy … but, with the start to the season the stable has had and Gollan’s record of pushing the envelope, you wouldn’t count anything out!
