Walker savours long-awaited second Group One

A second taste of Group One success was a long time coming for experienced horseman Danny Walker, whose superstar three-year-old Crocetti broke a 36-year drought in Saturday’s Al Basti Equiworld New Zealand 2000 Guineas.
Walker gained his grounding in the industry alongside his father Jack at Tauherenikau, and he was himself based at the southern Wairarapa track when, mere months after taking out his own training licence, he saddled Rastes to land a 50-to-one shock win in the Wellington Cup of 1987.
More than a third of a century later, Walker’s second Group One win could hardly have been more different. Crocetti lived up to his $1.40 favouritism with another sparkling performance in the Riccarton classic, extending his perfect record to six-from-six and cementing his place among New Zealand racing’s headline acts.
Walker shares the training of Crocetti with his long-time training partner Arron Tata, and the undefeated son of Zacinto races in the colours of owner-breeder Daniel Nakhle. Both Tata and Nakhle became first-time Group One winners in Saturday’s Guineas.
“It was an amazing day on Saturday,” Walker told RaceForm on Monday. “I’d won a Group One once before in the very early days of my career, but that’s a long time ago now and it’s been a fair while between drinks.
“The thrill of the win on Saturday was something completely different. Crocetti is a pretty special horse, that’s for sure.
“He gets back from Christchurch on Wednesday, and he’ll go straight out into the paddock for three weeks. We’ll assess it from there once he comes back into work, but the race where we’d quite like to kick him off again is the Gr. 3 Almanzor Trophy on Karaka Million night at Ellerslie.
“But that will all depend on how he’s going. If we don’t think he’ll be ready for that, we can save him for something else.
“Once he makes it back to the races, we’ll see how he goes in his first-up run before making any serious plans around what we do from there.”
Crocetti has delivered a new highlight in a long and well-travelled career for Walker, who spent several seasons overseas before ending up in his current base at Byerley Park in South Auckland.
“After starting out in the Wairarapa, I headed off and spent five years in Sydney in the ‘90s, working for Ingham Bloodstock. Then I had three years with Laurie Laxon in Singapore.
“I eventually wound up back in Cambridge, where Arron and I were doing some pre-training and breaking in. An opportunity happened to come up at Brookby Stables, we took it and the rest is history. It’s worked out really well.”
Former jumps jockey Tata officially joined Walker in a training partnership in the winter of 2022, and the pair have teamed up to record eight wins from their 69 starters since then.
Crocetti has been a significant contributor with six of those wins, including all of the pair’s first three shared successes at stakes level – the Gr. 3 Northland Breeders’ Stakes, the Gr. 2 Sarten Memorial and Saturday’s 2000 Guineas.
Walker was quick to deflect credit to Tata, whose role includes riding Crocetti in trackwork.
“Even though he’s only been an official co-trainer in more recent times, Arron has been a huge part of the operation all the way through,” Walker said. “He really does a great job.
“He gets a great feel of a horse when he's working them and he's never far wrong. He said from day one that Crocetti always had something.”
Another key part of this story was the decision to sell the Brookby Stables farm in Clevedon a few years ago and relocate to Byerley Park. That put Walker and Tata on the radar of Nakhle and his bloodstock manager, Carol Walker, who saw them as a good fit for a young horse that would later be named Crocetti.
“Daniel and Carol just happened to offer the horse to us after he was broken in,” Walker recalled. “They wanted to see how we got on with him, with Arron riding him as well.
“We really liked the horse straight away and thought he might be something special, and he’s just continued to improve ever since.”