‘You’ve gotta enjoy life and sell the dream’ - meet the pharmacist turned trainer with his sights set on Royal Ascot

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On this occasion, Trevor Marshallsea speaks to larger-than-life Australian-based trainer Bjorn Baker – subscribers can get more great insight every Monday to Friday.

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In the past few years on Australian racetracks there’s been a show within the show that’s become compelling viewing.

When Bjorn Baker trains a major winner, everybody tunes in.

Tall, rambunctious, physical - he also throws in “intolerable” - the Sydney-based New Zealander doesn’t let a golden moment slip by.

He’ll gallop around the mounting yard, arms raised, bellowing like a Viking, lifting mates, colleagues, loved ones off the ground. Google “Doncaster Dopamine” and you’ll get the idea.

Then once everything settles down - just a bit - the cameras and microphone holders swarm round, his post-race interviews being television gold.

It’ll be rambling, tangential, 100 mph. It’ll be emotional, heartfelt, and loud. And it’ll be funny - with occasional impersonations and voices for full effect.

William Haggas recently, famously, condensed horse training as “mostly disaster punctuated by the odd bit of good fortune”, accurate enough even accounting for that most identifiable of English birthrights - pessimism. Australian great Lee Freedman once said you don’t need to come into training with depression, for you’ll acquire it soon enough.

With those precepts in mind, you need to approach the business with the right attitude. The Baker Boys do horse training with a large sense of humour.

“You’ve gotta enjoy life and you’ve gotta sell the dream,” Baker says. 

“I’ve got a great bunch of clients and team around me, and we do enjoy it - win, lose or draw, because it’s a tough game, but you’ve gotta keep attacking and you’ve gotta be resilient.

“Everybody handles it differently. But I like having a bit of fun. We have a laugh, and I like to think I laugh at my own expense hopefully more than others.”

At the same time, in the past few years Baker has become seriously successful.

Starting with two horses in 2011 at the western Sydney training base of Warwick Farm racecourse, he’s become one of Australia’s most formidable conditioners, now with 211 named horses on his books.

Sourcing much of his stock with bloodstock agent Jim Clarke, a former employee of Godolphin in the UK, he’s accumulated Group 1s - he added three in six weeks during the recent autumn carnival - and has risen high among the top few names on the Sydney training premiership, finishing second in 2024-25 to the untouchable Chris Waller.

And now, for the first time, Royal Ascot might bear witness to the Baker show, as the 48-year-old with a lust for life takes his redoubtable sprinter Overpass to the King Charles III Stakes on the opening day.

• Dual Group 1 winner to join stacked Australian sprinting team at Royal Ascot 

Baker-style celebrations perhaps might not be the done thing at the royal meeting, but should the seven-year-old gelding prevail, prepare at least to see a top hat rocketing skywards.

Quick with a laugh, married father of two Baker’s role as a trainer, and his very persona, clash somewhat with his past occupation.

So many trainers grew up with this life. Baker did, at first, with his father being highly successful New Zealand trainer Murray Baker.

Speaking of tangents, Murray married a Swede, and thus we have a Kiwi called Bjorn, whose kids are Sven and Elisabet. So there really might be Viking blood involved when Baker’s veins are pumping amid the delirium of conquest.

But while raised around thoroughbreds, the young Bjorn struck out and became a pharmacist, which he explains with his typically dry New Zealand wit.

“I considered veterinary science, but the vet school was in the same place where I went to high school,” he says. “The benefits of being a vet were very much outweighed by the fact I’d have to stay in Palmerston North. It’s a good place to get out of.

“There’s no such thing as homesickness when you go to high school in Palmerston North and you grew up in Woodville.”

Bjorn Baker celebrates at Randwick with his father and mother, Murray and Marianne Credit: Getty Images

Baker not only fled the North Island but went as far away as possible in New Zealand - to Dunedin, at the bottom of the South Island. Four years later he was a qualified pharmacist, then that most identifiable of Kiwi traits kicked in - wanderlust.

He moved to Sydney - where he met his future wife and now his stable’s social media guru Andrea, who he says “used to think racing happened on two days a year, Boxing Day and Melbourne Cup day”. Three years later they made the well-trodden antipodean pilgrimage to London.

Baker hadn’t totally left racing. As he quenched the urge to travel, it was all turf related, and financed by his lifelong love of a bet. In fact, he remains a devout Racing Post fan because of this time in his life.

“I went to two Arcs, the Grosser Preis von Baden-Baden, two Group 1 races on the same day in Milan, Deauville,” he recalls. “Plus there was Royal Ascot, the Guineas meetings in Newmarket, the Cheltenham Gold Cup, et cetera.

“Racing subsidised a lot of my travel and extravagance. I loved a punt.”

It loved him back. Baker was an avid - and cashed-up - disciple of the Racing Post’s Pricewise tipster Tom Segal through his famous long-priced hot streak of 2005.

“A great man!” Baker still enthuses. “I followed his run from start to finish, so I did really well.”

Baker enjoyed Ireland for two years, sweetened by the win of one of his Australian Royal Ascot forebears Miss Andretti, who won the race he’s targeting in 2007.

“One of my biggest punts - it was a special day,” he says. “I was working in Dublin, and she beat the Irish horse Dandy Man. I thought I was gonna be lynched.”

The young pharmacist continued to stoke his love of horses, not just betting on them but being around them, developing a friendship with trainer John Oxx that would prove most helpful and formative.

“I’d go down to the Curragh one or two mornings every week with John,” Baker says. “I wasn’t getting paid, it was just great experience.

“John’s a legend. He’s straightforward, a very smart guy. What rubbed off was common sense and patience. I remember him saying, ‘Never too fast, too far, or too soon’.”

John Oxx had a huge influence on Baker's early time in racingCredit: Patrick McCann (racingpost.com/photos)

Eventually, the call of home and hoofs proved irresistible. In 2007, Baker returned home and teamed up with his father - thankful he’d left Woodville for the thoroughbred heartland of Cambridge, south of Auckland.

Finally the pharmacist was a horse trainer, though still grateful for how the former pursuit had equipped him, mostly, he says, “with a lot of common sense”.

“You’re exposed to different places, you meet different people. Every place had its own challenges, and you meet all walks of society from top to bottom,” he says.

“I thought I might do part-time pharmacy and part-time horses, but I went all in on the horses. I was in partnership with Murray for three years, and we had a pretty good run. We won 150-odd races, four Group 1s.”

One of those came “across the ditch” in Melbourne, when Lion Tamer - son of Britain’s Storming Home - took the prestigious VRC Derby at Flemington in 2010, by six and a half lengths. 

That inspired the 32-year-old Baker to make a go of it in Sydney. He was helped by a shove out of the nest by his no-nonsense father.

“I wanted to come to Sydney but remain in partnership, but Dad said, ‘If you go son, you’re on your own’,” he says.

“I thought that was a bit rough, because we were going in the right direction. But that was the making of me.

“Plus, after I’d been in Sydney for a while, he said in the New Zealand press that the best thing for our relationship has been the Tasman Sea,” Baker adds with a customary laugh.

The father and son did still work together, with Murray using Bjorn’s base to prepare several elite winners in Sydney, including a phenomenal four Australian Derby winners in a seven-year stretch. That record was what made the younger Baker’s Derby victory this year with son of Street Boss Green Spaces so special (also see “Bjorn Baker loses it trackside”).

He prepares Green Spaces as one of a handful of Australian trainers for Godolphin following the blue empire’s shift to public trainers last year, which also reflects Baker’s recent powerful upswing.

For that, he credits building new stables, reducing the number of good horses sold to Hong Kong - more affordable thanks to Sydney’s prize-money boom - hard work and building a strong team of people around him.

“But mostly it’s been about just getting better class horses, learning a little bit, building relationships, and being able to be more patient and focus on the big races,” he says.

The poster boy for building relationships, and the cash cow who’s facilitated patience, is Overpass, the star turn among many for Baker and Darby Racing.

Overpass is fancied to win the King Charles III StakesCredit: Supplied

Syndicator Scott Darby has a knack for sourcing quality stock for Baker, whether buying them as yearlings like Overpass, on the local second-hand market like Group 1 winner Caballus, or imported stakes victors including Irish stayer Anchorage. 

Overpass was a $70,000 yearling purchase who now, in this time of crazy Australian purses, has won $12.6 million.

The front-running sprinter is already a specialist at Ascot - the Perth version. 

He won the first two editions of its lucrative if oddly-named slot race The Quokka (it’s a marsupial that mostly lives around Perth), raking in $4m. He’s also won Perth’s premier WFA sprint, the Winterbottom Stakes, twice over the same six-furlong trip.

Now the seven-year-old drops to five furlongs for the first time since his second start way back in 2021. That came when Baker launched him in easy bush company, as he does with many horses, at the town of Orange in New South Wales. 

Overpass has done much for Baker’s stable, and for his sire Vancouver, an Australian champion two-year-old who went to Aidan O’Brien for a time, before becoming a rather underwhelming stallion with Coolmore Australia. He’s now in Libya.

That son of Medaglia d’Oro had been intended for Royal Ascot but never made it. Now, his star progeny - by many lengths - will attempt a magical first Royal Ascot mission for Baker and Darby, and is a 7-2 favourite to win.

“Overpass is definitely special,” Baker says of the gelding out of a fairly modest daughter of Exceed And Excel. 

“He’s been around since an autumn two-year-old, and has been very sound and consistent.

“He’s tenacious, he always puts in 100 per cent. He’s really been the backbone of my stable, and probably the rise of my stable in a lot of ways.

“He’s taken the pressure off myself and my team at times too, so he’s been a remarkable horse, for myself and for the connections. He’s even carried Vancouver, a very limited stallion.”

Baker has no doubt about Overpass over Ascot’s straight five furlongs, calling it perhaps as tough as a six-furlong race with a bend, but admits to having “no idea what we’re up against”, though the bookies’ assessment encourages him.

“To win would be a dream come true,” he says. “Just to have a runner there will be very special, and would cap a great few years.

“It’s one of the world’s great racecourses, and undoubtedly one of the world’s great racing carnivals.

“You dream about having a horse there, and Australian horses have done well there from limited runners. That makes it a realistic option firstly, and secondly, hopefully to be competitive. That’s what we’re there for.”

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Pedigree pick

Recent big buy Royal Heritage, a son of Blue Point, makes his debut in the 7.00 at Hamilton today. 

The Hamad Al Jehani-trained colt will sport the Wathnan colours for his first start having been bought by Richard Brown on behalf of the emerging operation for €800,000 at last month’s Arqana May Breeze-Up Sale in Deauville. That result delivered Sarah O’Connell of Longways Stables a massive return on the 98,000gns she gave for the youngster as a yearling last year. 

Royal Heritage is out of an unraced daughter of Smart Strike, Alaata, who is in turn out of Firth Of Clyde Stakes winner Alshadiyah, the dam of Grade 3 scorer Farhaan and stakes winner Haatheq.

Royal Heritage19:00 Hamilton

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Jky: James Doyle Tnr: Hamad Al Jehani

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Good Morning Bloodstock is our unmissable email newsletter. Leading bloodstock journalist Martin Stevens provides his take and insight on the biggest stories every morning from Monday to Friday.