Gai Waterhouse is nothing less than an Australian icon. Well known beyond racing’s parameters, she has topped the Sydney trainers’ table five times. Her patrons read like a who’s who of the sport. After an age spent in her legendary father’s shadow, the spotlight rests firmly upon a women who does not shy from it. Life could hardly be sweeter.

It therefore comes as a shock when Waterhouse maintains that she would leave it all behind to move to Britain. “I’d give anything to train here,” she said. “It has always been an ambition of mine, but I have never had the opportunity. If it ever arose I would grab it by the horns.”

Instead she pays a fleeting visit to saddle Bentley Biscuit, her first runner in Britain, at Royal Ascot next week. But there will be no quips about penguin-clad men from one who hardly ever misses the five-day jamboree.

Waterhouse, who was born in Scotland, spent three happy years treading the British boards in her youth. She is as Anglophile as any from her country will ever be. Even among the finest millinery next week, she will cut a dash. It was ever thus for this Australian racing scion who married a warned-off bookmaker in Robbie Waterhouse.

Tommy Smith won Sydney’s training title a mind-boggling 33 years running. He was a hard taskmaster to a daughter whose first love was acting, and who had to be cajoled into working at the family stable. “By then I’d developed a greater love of racing than I thought I had,” Waterhouse, 52, reflected. “When I was in England I was constantly reading about it and going racing between shows.”

She describes her time by her late father’s side as “a battle of the titans”. Which is to say that Smith must have been a formidable character. “He had a very dominant personality,” Waterhouse said. “When I started out, there was every chance he’d gallop my horses while I was away. And when I’d ask why, he’d point out that he owned half of them – and that he did it better anyway.”

Nevertheless, that was as nothing to the reaction Waterhouse’s early success generated in what remained a decidedly male enclave. “It was very hard,” she recalled. “I was seen very much as my father’s daughter. People were always saying that I wasn’t doing it, that I couldn’t do it. It was so much rubbish.”

As a result, Waterhouse was careful not to saddle her first runner until she felt it would win. Her first five runners obliged in 1992, the last of them in group three company. “I wanted to make a statement to the public and the knockers that I could train,” she said. “Even then, it took a few years for them to give me the credit.”

The canvas is different now. Waterhouse is the public face of racing, as recognisable as any of that country’s sportsmen, and revered by racefans in her native Sydney. She would doubtless love to leave her distinct imprint on Royal Ascot with a horse successful on each of his past three starts.

She knows it will be tough for Bentley Biscuit, who confronts a big field in the King’s Stand Stakes on Tuesday. He was among 26 horses to stand their ground yesterday for the five-furlong sprint. In contrast, the two group one races over a mile will not be so densely populated. George Washington heads a cast of nine left in the Queen Anne Stakes, while Cockney Rebel will face a maximum ten opponents in the St James’s Palace Stakes.