Zac Lloyd’s ascension towards Sydney racing’s elite took another giant step on Thursday night when the star apprentice ended a decade of Chris Waller domination in the Bart Cummings Medal.
Lloyd finished the season with a flourish to finish on 81 points, 17 clear of Gai Waterhouse and Adrian Bott with Waller, a 12-time winner of the award, in third on 62 points.
The Bart Cummings Medal is New South Wales racing’s premier individual award with votes awarded by seven leading Sydney racing journalists.
It was yet another accolade for Lloyd, who rode 76 metropolitan winners for the season – the most by an apprentice in Sydney since the 1980/81 season – to be crowned Sydney’s leading apprentice and the winner of the Theo Green Award.
“Zac has enjoyed a highly successful season where he also won the Sydney apprentices’ premiership but to beat the 12-time Bart Cummings Medal winner Chris Waller highlights the enormous magnitude of the win,” Racing NSW chief executive Peter V’Landys said.
Rounding out the top five in the Bart Cummings Medal were champion jockey James Mcdonald, who finished one vote behind Waller, while Dylan Gibbons, who was runner-up Lloyd in the apprentice jockeys’ premiership, finished on 48.
The other major jockeys’ award presented at the function at Royal Randwick was the George Moore Award for Sydney’s leading jockey, which went to James McDonald for the seventh time.
While Waller had his Bart Cummings Medal streak broken, he collected the T J Smith Award for the 13th consecutive year after preparing 139 city winners for the season.
A swag of NSW Racehorse Owners awards were also presented, including the NSW Champion Horse of the Year, which was awarded to James Cummings-trained star Anamoe, who also won the champion miler and champion middle-distance awards.