Yell will be the first international races runner from Crown Lodge - or for that matter prepared by Hawkes, who has other owners - but the trainer shrugs at this anomaly for the biggest and most successful yard in Australia over the past decade.

After he finished second in the Group One Manikato Stakes early in the Australian spring, a slight interruption to Yell's training led to his presence here, as Hawkes was not prepared to proceed to the best domestic races without the horse at his peak.

'You don't win good races with horses if they are even five per cent off their best and it's not my style to expect to,' he said at Sha Tin yesterday morning. 'So we set him for here. Some of the horses that come here do so as an afterthought. That's not my style and that's why he's the first. And you need the right horse, whether you're taking them interstate or internationally.

'If I'm going to bring a horse here, it's going to be one set for the race. He may not be good enough, we'll see, but you don't turn up half-hearted - you have to come knowing you've given yourself a good shot.'

Depending on how people find John Hawkes, they can see him as stubborn, dogmatic, even downright difficult. He can be a brusque interview, a man whose duty to his job and employers dictates his priorities, and he has frequently fallen out with sections of the racing media in Australia.

But the fairest assessment of what he has done at Crown Lodge is that it is remarkable, the work of a perfectionist who won't accept anything less, co-ordinating a 500-horse operation across four-states with training centres thousands of kilometres apart.

The stock are overwhelmingly home-breds from Woodlands Stud, about three hours' drive north of Sydney, which produces several hundred babies to begin the racing process every season, and Crown Lodge controls all the stabling, training, feeding and care to take them through to the end of it.

And the late Jack Ingham, who with his brother Bob started the Crown Lodge concept in the 1980s, took great pride in the fact that the private racing business ran at a profit at the stake-money level.

In his turn, Hawkes can be just as proud. Everything is run like a business and like clockwork, constantly looking ahead and preparing for the next step, whether it's a runner in Hong Kong or the mental training of the next batch of babies.

'We just took about 80 of the two-year-olds down to Melbourne,' Hawkes said yesterday. 'Most of them probably won't race, they just do it for experience. It toughens them up mentally, gets them used to it.'

Travelling large numbers of horses successfully is something Crown Lodge does with monotonous regularity between Australian states, from Group Ones down to bush maidens. Fitting the right race to the right horse is a vital piece of the puzzle, so when Hawkes travels, his record demands respect.

'Actually, it has probably been easier [coming] to Hong Kong with Yell,' he said. 'He was 13 hours stable to stable, comparable to an interstate road trip, but on the plane you don't have the bumps and turns to upset the horse.'

He shrugs about Yell's body weight on arrival. 'I don't know and really I don't care. I don't believe in it. The eye is the best guide, the eye and knowing your horse. To me it's not important whether he went up or down 20 pounds, it's about the horse. If they ever find a way for a computer to train horses by numbers, I'll be out of a job.

'Yell tightened up a bit, but he's let down again and he's well. My son Wayne, who runs the Melbourne stable, has been here, knows him and he's happy. Paul Snowden rides him all the time, he's happy.'

Yell won't do much on the track while he's here - 'if you're trying to get them fit at this stage, you're too late' - though he may have a sharpen-up tomorrow if he needs it.

'We probably picked a bad year to come, with a champion like Silent Witness around, but they all get beaten,' he said. 'It can happen because they just don't feel right on the day or something didn't work out. They're still the best horse, they just didn't win that day. I don't think we'll be disgraced.'