I’m looking forward to this weekend’s trek to the Hunter Valley for the stallion parades – Patinack, Darley, Widden, Coolmore - plus a few other visits to check up on various clients’ private interests.
I can’t wait for James Bester to tell us in his mellifluous tones how bulging are the muscles above the eyes of the Coolmore stallions.
I live in hope that, for once, Darley might start on time.
If they don’t, could they please arrange a big screen so we can at least watch the Sydney and Melbourne races (the reason why so many invitees arrive late in the first place – and Darley will win half the races anyway) or put on some Brazilian dancers to entertain we assembled multitudes. It’s usually freezing by start time, 3.30 p.m., so please don’t keep us waiting – with the number of stallions they’ve got it’ll be nightfall by the time it’s over.
I look forward to seeing what’s happening at Patinack, as well as their new stallions.
I will continue to wonder at the stoicism of the people who live and work at Widden when you consider how far it is to the nearest corner store. And then I will spare a thought for those who live even further down this blind valley.
I will be interested, though saddened, to hear more about the alleged matrimonial turmoil being experienced by one of the highest profile operators in our business.
Sorry, this is starting to read like Hunter Valley Confidential.
If you're going up, check out the weather forecast using the widget on the right.
There’s been no shortage of nice young horses hitting the tracks in the last couple of weeks and the strength of competition we’re about to witness is the one positive legacy of the 2007 EI interruption.
From a purely personal point of view (isn’t that what a blog is meant to be?) I was pleased with the win of Geared Up (3g Testa Rossa-Certain, by Rory’s Jester) at Canterbury today as I bought this fellow for $100,000 at Magic Millions 2007.
The other Testa Rossa I bought ($50,000) that year, Ortensia (ex Aerate’s Pick, by Picnicker), had her unbeaten skein snapped when third resuming behind boom colt Time Thief, to whom she gave weight, at Moonee Valley. Let’s say she looked to be sympathetically handled, though not coping too well with the tight Valley circuit. She found the line just as well as Time Thief if you check the replay. She will figure amongst the best fillies if the lid can be kept on her powder-keg temperament so it was probably a good thing that she didn’t have a first-up gut-buster. I’ve been involved previously with another horse from this family and he, too, was a head case. He won a race at Mount Garnet – go Google Earth that one. One of this family’s remote branches produced Bollinger who has been in the news this week with a promising newcomer winner in the UK.
The impressive Canterbury win of Kimillsy (3f Danehill Dancer (Ire)-Lady Fidelia, by Snippets) suggested she is a stakes-class performer in waiting. Regular readers of this blog (all two of you, hi Mum and Dad!) might recall I labeled her in a post of 10 March as one of my best fillies from the sales of 2007, rueing the fact that I was underbidder on her. Picking them is not so difficult, getting the right buying budget definitely is. However, I am thinking of changing my name by deed poll to John Ferguson or Colm Santry or Nathan Tinkler.
Pleasingly, we have had our share of high-priced yearlings coming through in recent days. Allied Force (4h Redoute’s Choice-Urge To Merge, by Last Tycoon (Ire)) has an awesome way of going and he looks another rising star from this fail-safe family. I rated him a 9.0 at the 2006 Sydney Easter Sale which means he sits on the right hand of God. Nothing ever gets a 9.0! - maybe Dance Hero, Choisir or Exceed And Excel did. I didn’t have to be a genius to do that, he is an outstanding specimen, even though he has a jaw worse than Dulcify’s. It took a bid of $2 million to ‘buy’ him, though I see he still races substantially in the interests of those who put him through the ring and close friends of the family. I don’t know why I should be altogether surprised about that.
I got out of my ‘flu infested sickbed and traipsed to Newcastle on Tuesday to see one of my charges, Anavila (5g Anabaa (USA)-Highest Cool (Fr), by Highest Honor) go around. He had been balloted out of three races in the previous 10 days and although this 900m race was 4 – 500 metres short of the distance we desired for him, it was the only race in which he could gain a start. He defied us by winning anyway. Smart, aren’t we? I’ve previously expressed my appreciation of Jeff Lloyd’s riding; he’s enormously experienced and oh so good in my opinion. Sydney hasn’t been so well off for first class jockeys in a long time. There’s almost no room now for Beadman (oh yeah?). Not that Anavila was ever a high-priced yearling. He didn’t go through the sale ring as he has a terrible sway back. But it doesn’t seem to worry him. Chris Waller has turned this gelding around, as he has many others, almost daily. Like the jockey, a real talent. I recall a horse of David Hayes's, Dark Ksar, who won a million dollars and was a very swampy-backed beast. He had cost $750.
Newcastle was notable for the impressive graduation of Redoute’s Choice’s rellie Movin’ Out (3f Encosta de Lago-Twyla, by Danehill (USA)), $2.2 million worth of Woodlands-now-Darley investment. Apart from certain yearlings ‘bought’ by certain trainers from certain studs in recent years, they don’t make that sort of money unless they are an Adonis (who was a male, but you get my drift), and of course she was, an 8.0.
Then there’s the aforementioned Time Thief (3c Redoute’s Choice-Procrastinate, by Jade Hunter (USA)), the ninth foal of a very good racemare and producer. Another lazy $2 million, sold from the Kia Ora Stud draft at Easter 2007 on behalf of the fondly remembered Michael Ryan. Surprise, surprise, Time Thief was an 8.0, another equine Robert Redford. That dates me, I hope all my readers are 50-plus so they’ll know who I’m talking about. Hi, Mum and Dad.
In case you’re wondering how my number system pans out, I classify the horses as I see them without any conscious idea of how many in any sale I’m giving a ‘buy’ mark to. When I look back afterwards, I’ve found consistently that only about 15% of any catalogue gets a mark high enough for a decent second look. That’s probably too many – about 75 in your average Sydney Easter sale. There aren't that many good horses in it.
I’ll probably front up at the Scone Broodmare Sale Friday. Very underwhelming. In terms of horseflesh, I’d be better off at the Warwick Farm or Gosford barrier trials.
Of Medals And Men
It beggars belief that in some circles Australia's “slipping’ to 6th place on the Olympic gold medal tally (5th in medals overall) is regarded as a disappointment or a dent to national pride.
With the exception of Jamaica and New Zealand (oh no! how did those words get in here?!!), Australia is the greatest, consistent, puncher-above-its-weight in international sport by a country mile.
But Australians are probably also world leaders in unrealistic expectation as far as their athletes and sportsmen are concerned - champions at aggressive nationalism.
Australia achieves what it achieves off a population base of 21 million people. It has little right to expect the success levels it attains. But it can be unforgiving when an athlete or team fails to reproduce the level of performance expected of them.
Money is the reason for that. On a per-head basis, sport is well funded in Australia so results are seen in terms of a return on investment. These sportsmen and women are expected to be accountable. We're quick to give them a bagging if they fail to deliver. The message about participation being more important than victory features a long way down the page.
Australia is a rich, fortunate, developed country with an equable climate which encourages an outdoors ethic but by no means the only country enjoying a superior standard of living, yet it still finishes a street ahead of its peers in the sporting realm. What’s not to be happy about?
To illustrate this, it may or may not be rational to divide the population base by the number of Olympic gold medals won in 2008 to see how many people it ‘took’ to produce each gold. Irrational or not, I’m going to do it. Here’s how the table looks:
Jamaica 466,000 people per gold medal, New Zealand 1.4 million, Australia 1.5 million,
Georgia (war and all) 1.5 million, Mongolia 1.5 million, Norway 1.6 million, Slovakia 1.8 million, Netherlands 2.3 million, Belarus 2.4 million, Denmark 2.7 million, Great Britain 3.2 million, Hungary 3.3 million, Czech Republic 3.5 million, Korea, South 3.7 million,Switzerland 3.8 million, Germany 5.1 million, Romania 5.5 million, Russian Federation 6.2 million, Ukraine 6.5 million, Kenya 7 million, Italy 7.5 million, United States of America 8.3 million, Spain 9 million, France 9.1 million, Canada 11 million, Poland 12.8 million, Japan 13.3 million, Ethiopia 19.5 million, Argentina 20 million, China 23.5 million,Brazil 62 million.
The likes of India (1.1 billion people) and Indonesia (234 million people) won a single gold medal each. Must be something to do with their names. And consider some of the countries which could not field a gold medal winning athlete - South Africa, Nigeria, Sweden, Greece, Chile, Venezuela and Malaysia.
Chris Dillow, writing in The Times (of London) in the wake of British euphoria at their medals haul, used an even better way of determining success, and his article, slightly abridged for relevance, follows:
There is another league table, published recently by the World Bank, which ranks countries by national income. And this bears a striking resemblance to the medals table.
Nine of the top ten countries in the medals table are in the top 15 of the World Bank table; the exception is the Ukraine. Across all 87 countries to have won a medal, the correlation between the medals ranking and the GDP ranking is 0.41 - far higher than you would reasonably expect by accident.
In this respect, the Beijing Olympics were not unusual. In a recent paper Hon-Kwong Lui and Wing Suen, two Chinese economists, showed that population and national income per person were “major determinants” of medals won in Olympics between 1952 and 2004.
The reason for this is trivially simple. The more people a country has, the more chance it has of producing a medallist. And the richer it is, the more able it is to invest in talent-spotting or in training facilities, and the more chance it has of its sports becoming Olympic events; as Matthew Syed pointed out in these pages, sailing gets lots of medals but kabaddi doesn't.
Big economies should therefore get more medals than small ones. And they do. This suggests a different way of judging Olympic success. We should compare a nation's position in the medals table to its position in the GDP table.
On this basis, Britain's performance was no better than respectable. Our fourth place in the medals table is just one place better than our position in the national income table. The notable fact about British Olympians is their underperformance in previous Games rather than huge outperformance in these.
By this measure, I'm sad to report, the Aussies did better than us. Their sixth position in the medals table is nine places better than their national income ranking. We can, though, take comfort in the fact that Germany - fifth in the medals table - underperformed relative to its economy.
So, who are the winners and losers by this standard? The winner is the Dominican Republic. Its one gold and one silver put it 47th in the medals table, while its puny economy is only the 179th in the world. Mongolia, Zimbabwe and Jamaica also did well.
The loser is Taiwan. It has the 17th biggest economy in the world, but came a mere 79th in the medals table.
There is a pattern here. The countries that punched above their economic weight in these games - which include North Korea, Cuba and Uzbekistan - are in many cases nations not renowned for their peace, political stability or respect for human rights; Jamaica is no place to be if you are a homosexual. Many of the losers have a better record.
This vindicates Harry Lime's theory. As he said in The Third Man, warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed gave us Michelangelo, da Vinci and the Renaissance while 500 years of democracy and peace in Switzerland (35th in the medals table and 22nd in the GDP table) produced only the cuckoo clock. (Even this was wrong; the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany.)
Excellence in the Olympics, then, is no sign of a wider flourishing of a nation. Gordon Brown might care to consider this before celebrating the British results.
There is an even stronger pattern. The 2008 medals ranking is similar to the 2004 ranking. The correlation between the two is a hefty 0.8. The ranking in the Athens games alone explains, in the statistical sense, three-fifths of the variation in the Beijing rankings. Of the countries to have “medalled” most - including team GB - moved fewer than ten places in the rankings between 2004 and 2008.
In other words, history matters. A nation with a culture of winning medals tends to continue doing so; nations with no such culture find it much harder.
There is a lesson here for anyone running any large organisation. Big groups - nations, firms, government departments - have history, traditions and culture that heavily influence their chances of success or failure. These cannot easily be overridden by the mere will of a leader.
You have probably got an objection to all this. When Chris Hoy sat on his bike on the starting line, he did not look at his rivals and think: “I come from a richer nation than most of those guys; this'll be a cinch.” Instead, he focused upon giving all he could.
And this is the point. From the point of view of the individual competitor, Olympic success is about skill, training and dedication - and, arguably, perhaps even natural talent. But from the point of view of the nation, success depends upon history and economics.
In other words, overall outcomes are not necessarily merely the result of individual motivations added together. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
When the likes of Choisir, Starcraft, Haradasun, Miss Andretti and Black Mamba venture overseas and win races of high significance, we thump our chests and scream our heads off with pride. Yes, they have overcome the tyranny of distance, seasonal change and adjustment to alien styles of training and racing. But they come from the second biggest thoroughbred population on earth so they ought to be good enough.
By the way, nearly as many horses drug tested positive at these Olympics as did athletes.
With the exception of Jamaica and New Zealand (oh no! how did those words get in here?!!), Australia is the greatest, consistent, puncher-above-its-weight in international sport by a country mile.
But Australians are probably also world leaders in unrealistic expectation as far as their athletes and sportsmen are concerned - champions at aggressive nationalism.
Australia achieves what it achieves off a population base of 21 million people. It has little right to expect the success levels it attains. But it can be unforgiving when an athlete or team fails to reproduce the level of performance expected of them.
Money is the reason for that. On a per-head basis, sport is well funded in Australia so results are seen in terms of a return on investment. These sportsmen and women are expected to be accountable. We're quick to give them a bagging if they fail to deliver. The message about participation being more important than victory features a long way down the page.
Australia is a rich, fortunate, developed country with an equable climate which encourages an outdoors ethic but by no means the only country enjoying a superior standard of living, yet it still finishes a street ahead of its peers in the sporting realm. What’s not to be happy about?
To illustrate this, it may or may not be rational to divide the population base by the number of Olympic gold medals won in 2008 to see how many people it ‘took’ to produce each gold. Irrational or not, I’m going to do it. Here’s how the table looks:
Jamaica 466,000 people per gold medal, New Zealand 1.4 million, Australia 1.5 million,
Georgia (war and all) 1.5 million, Mongolia 1.5 million, Norway 1.6 million, Slovakia 1.8 million, Netherlands 2.3 million, Belarus 2.4 million, Denmark 2.7 million, Great Britain 3.2 million, Hungary 3.3 million, Czech Republic 3.5 million, Korea, South 3.7 million,Switzerland 3.8 million, Germany 5.1 million, Romania 5.5 million, Russian Federation 6.2 million, Ukraine 6.5 million, Kenya 7 million, Italy 7.5 million, United States of America 8.3 million, Spain 9 million, France 9.1 million, Canada 11 million, Poland 12.8 million, Japan 13.3 million, Ethiopia 19.5 million, Argentina 20 million, China 23.5 million,Brazil 62 million.
The likes of India (1.1 billion people) and Indonesia (234 million people) won a single gold medal each. Must be something to do with their names. And consider some of the countries which could not field a gold medal winning athlete - South Africa, Nigeria, Sweden, Greece, Chile, Venezuela and Malaysia.
Chris Dillow, writing in The Times (of London) in the wake of British euphoria at their medals haul, used an even better way of determining success, and his article, slightly abridged for relevance, follows:
There is another league table, published recently by the World Bank, which ranks countries by national income. And this bears a striking resemblance to the medals table.
Nine of the top ten countries in the medals table are in the top 15 of the World Bank table; the exception is the Ukraine. Across all 87 countries to have won a medal, the correlation between the medals ranking and the GDP ranking is 0.41 - far higher than you would reasonably expect by accident.
In this respect, the Beijing Olympics were not unusual. In a recent paper Hon-Kwong Lui and Wing Suen, two Chinese economists, showed that population and national income per person were “major determinants” of medals won in Olympics between 1952 and 2004.
The reason for this is trivially simple. The more people a country has, the more chance it has of producing a medallist. And the richer it is, the more able it is to invest in talent-spotting or in training facilities, and the more chance it has of its sports becoming Olympic events; as Matthew Syed pointed out in these pages, sailing gets lots of medals but kabaddi doesn't.
Big economies should therefore get more medals than small ones. And they do. This suggests a different way of judging Olympic success. We should compare a nation's position in the medals table to its position in the GDP table.
On this basis, Britain's performance was no better than respectable. Our fourth place in the medals table is just one place better than our position in the national income table. The notable fact about British Olympians is their underperformance in previous Games rather than huge outperformance in these.
By this measure, I'm sad to report, the Aussies did better than us. Their sixth position in the medals table is nine places better than their national income ranking. We can, though, take comfort in the fact that Germany - fifth in the medals table - underperformed relative to its economy.
So, who are the winners and losers by this standard? The winner is the Dominican Republic. Its one gold and one silver put it 47th in the medals table, while its puny economy is only the 179th in the world. Mongolia, Zimbabwe and Jamaica also did well.
The loser is Taiwan. It has the 17th biggest economy in the world, but came a mere 79th in the medals table.
There is a pattern here. The countries that punched above their economic weight in these games - which include North Korea, Cuba and Uzbekistan - are in many cases nations not renowned for their peace, political stability or respect for human rights; Jamaica is no place to be if you are a homosexual. Many of the losers have a better record.
This vindicates Harry Lime's theory. As he said in The Third Man, warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed gave us Michelangelo, da Vinci and the Renaissance while 500 years of democracy and peace in Switzerland (35th in the medals table and 22nd in the GDP table) produced only the cuckoo clock. (Even this was wrong; the cuckoo clock was invented in Germany.)
Excellence in the Olympics, then, is no sign of a wider flourishing of a nation. Gordon Brown might care to consider this before celebrating the British results.
There is an even stronger pattern. The 2008 medals ranking is similar to the 2004 ranking. The correlation between the two is a hefty 0.8. The ranking in the Athens games alone explains, in the statistical sense, three-fifths of the variation in the Beijing rankings. Of the countries to have “medalled” most - including team GB - moved fewer than ten places in the rankings between 2004 and 2008.
In other words, history matters. A nation with a culture of winning medals tends to continue doing so; nations with no such culture find it much harder.
There is a lesson here for anyone running any large organisation. Big groups - nations, firms, government departments - have history, traditions and culture that heavily influence their chances of success or failure. These cannot easily be overridden by the mere will of a leader.
You have probably got an objection to all this. When Chris Hoy sat on his bike on the starting line, he did not look at his rivals and think: “I come from a richer nation than most of those guys; this'll be a cinch.” Instead, he focused upon giving all he could.
And this is the point. From the point of view of the individual competitor, Olympic success is about skill, training and dedication - and, arguably, perhaps even natural talent. But from the point of view of the nation, success depends upon history and economics.
In other words, overall outcomes are not necessarily merely the result of individual motivations added together. Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.
When the likes of Choisir, Starcraft, Haradasun, Miss Andretti and Black Mamba venture overseas and win races of high significance, we thump our chests and scream our heads off with pride. Yes, they have overcome the tyranny of distance, seasonal change and adjustment to alien styles of training and racing. But they come from the second biggest thoroughbred population on earth so they ought to be good enough.
By the way, nearly as many horses drug tested positive at these Olympics as did athletes.
Danehill Is Not Dead
The name lives on ... at a furniture store in Chatswood, Sydney. Thanks to BR for sending the pic. Should be a stack of world-class chairs, beds and tallboys come out of this store, though by the look of the signwriting you wouldn't bet on it. Or perhaps it's named after the village in East Sussex which gave its name to the horse?
Totally unrelated to the above, what an embarrassment the Olympic equestrian coverage has been. One chance in four years ... oh dear.
I had to get my TV specially tuned to receive Channel 7 just for the Olympics. No mature person watches 7, 9 or 10 so I have a bar on my remote just in case I am ever tempted to have a juvenile moment. Channel 7's coverage overall hasn't matched the quality of the sport we've witnessed and they will have paid handsomely for the opportunity not to do better. If you flick on to SBS by mistake, where they show some of the more 'ethnic European' and non-mainstream sports, you might realise that countries other than Australia, the USA and China actually compete at these games. Another thing I'll be relieved to see the back of is the cycling ... after the Tour de France there's only so much more one can take of Phil Liggett.
My Other Life
Their Cups Runneth Over
Here’s the follow-up from last weekend’s bush carnivals (see post What Petrol Crisis, below).
I’ll bet a more ‘valuable’ horse hasn’t won a feature race in far north Queensland than Pure Silence who won the Cairns Cup on Sunday.
The seven-year-old Japanese-conceived son of the late, exalted Sunday Silence and Engraver (USA) was a $900,000 yearling when sold by Arrowfield at the 2003 Magic Millions.
Trained these days at Atherton on the tablelands above Cairns, Pure Silence beat the Brisbane raider In Rehearsal to record his second win from 10 starts up in the tropics. Overall, he’s now eight wins and $181,225, a bit shy of the $900k. Pity he lost his nuts years ago, he could have started a sire dynasty in Cairns, though the cursed blood of his damsire Miner's Mark would probably have let him down (see my post Archipenko Is Doubly Special, July 13). Pure Silence's best previous win was as a four-year-old in the 2005 Moe Cup. Other starts (unsuccessful) on his CV include the VRC St Leger, South Australian Derby and VRC Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
On the other side of the continent, in Broome (track pictured), the Perth visitor Great Destiny (5g Second Empire-Mars Lily) won the Cup by a head over the sometimes Perth competitor Tearinupthecountry (NZ) (8g Pentire-Gemscay). The latter has seen a darn sight more of the continent than I have; his previous racing life included stints in Victoria and Queensland. This pair finished in the reverse order in the lead-up, the Kimberley Cup at Broome on 26 July. Obviously the 1.5 kgs shift in the weights this time made the difference. Good to see weights mean something even in Broome. It's reported that about 8,000 attended the meeting with Broome Cup week pumping about $10 million into the local economy.
But form counted for nothing over at Roxby Downs in South Australia with their Cup going to the rank outsider from Strathalbyn, Venomous (5g Dangerous-Surprise Symphony) in front of about 2,000 fans. With a name like that he should have been the omen tip, considering Roxby Downs is uranium country. You had to go back 12 starts to find when Venomous last filled a place, a second at Broken Hill five months ago. Do they swab for plutonium? This fine beast has now won two of his 35 starts. I noted in my earlier post that there were two senior riders at this meeting and, lo and behold, they grabbed the quinella, Tamara Zanker beating Philip Crich. Ah, you can’t beat experience and doubtless readers of my blog took the tip and collected big-time at Roxby Downs.
Now to famous Louth. See David Houston’s comments attached to the post below. Sounds like a
good time was definitely had by all 7,000 people, or was someone seeing double? !! I wonder if there was a booze bus outside the track. I wonder if there was anything outside the track, or if the pilots had to blow into the bag before taking their planes back home? (some of the Louth crowd, right - the queue for the loo?).
Greg Ryan’s following in the bush ensured $3.00 favouritism for Intheway (6g Intergaze-Getting Ahead) and the bookies were done over once again when the pair strolled home a length and three-quarters to the good of my old mate Rocking On (NZ), a one-time promising stayer who succumbed to a wind problem. The formline was strong – Intheway was coming off a resolute ninth of 10, beaten 8.5 lengths, in a 1465m handicap at Wondai, Queensland. Just prior to that he had finished second of six in the Cup at the Wean picnics, carrying the steadier of 69.5 kgs. Wean is a speck on the road between Boggabri and Manilla, in the north-west hinterland behind Tamworth. It’s post code 2382 and, according to the census, 1,487 people inhabit the area covered by post code 2382 of which 96% are Australian born and only 8% profess to have ‘no religion’. Trainer and part-owner Gary Popp obviously doesn’t mind a trip. He trains Intheway at Warwick. Wean is just next door, 497 kms south of Warwick, but Louth is a proper drive, 870 kms south. But what the heck, Queensland fuel is cheaper. The horse obviously returned to the form which won him a $50,000 handicap at Doomben back in February. The drive home, all 870 kms of it, must seem a lot shorter when you’ve got the chocolates. Even if you've had to fill the tank with extortionate 'fuel watch' NSW gas.
Someone whispered to me that there are carnivals about to kick off in Melbourne and Sydney. I'll try and pay attention.
I’ll bet a more ‘valuable’ horse hasn’t won a feature race in far north Queensland than Pure Silence who won the Cairns Cup on Sunday.
The seven-year-old Japanese-conceived son of the late, exalted Sunday Silence and Engraver (USA) was a $900,000 yearling when sold by Arrowfield at the 2003 Magic Millions.
Trained these days at Atherton on the tablelands above Cairns, Pure Silence beat the Brisbane raider In Rehearsal to record his second win from 10 starts up in the tropics. Overall, he’s now eight wins and $181,225, a bit shy of the $900k. Pity he lost his nuts years ago, he could have started a sire dynasty in Cairns, though the cursed blood of his damsire Miner's Mark would probably have let him down (see my post Archipenko Is Doubly Special, July 13). Pure Silence's best previous win was as a four-year-old in the 2005 Moe Cup. Other starts (unsuccessful) on his CV include the VRC St Leger, South Australian Derby and VRC Queen Elizabeth Stakes.
On the other side of the continent, in Broome (track pictured), the Perth visitor Great Destiny (5g Second Empire-Mars Lily) won the Cup by a head over the sometimes Perth competitor Tearinupthecountry (NZ) (8g Pentire-Gemscay). The latter has seen a darn sight more of the continent than I have; his previous racing life included stints in Victoria and Queensland. This pair finished in the reverse order in the lead-up, the Kimberley Cup at Broome on 26 July. Obviously the 1.5 kgs shift in the weights this time made the difference. Good to see weights mean something even in Broome. It's reported that about 8,000 attended the meeting with Broome Cup week pumping about $10 million into the local economy.But form counted for nothing over at Roxby Downs in South Australia with their Cup going to the rank outsider from Strathalbyn, Venomous (5g Dangerous-Surprise Symphony) in front of about 2,000 fans. With a name like that he should have been the omen tip, considering Roxby Downs is uranium country. You had to go back 12 starts to find when Venomous last filled a place, a second at Broken Hill five months ago. Do they swab for plutonium? This fine beast has now won two of his 35 starts. I noted in my earlier post that there were two senior riders at this meeting and, lo and behold, they grabbed the quinella, Tamara Zanker beating Philip Crich. Ah, you can’t beat experience and doubtless readers of my blog took the tip and collected big-time at Roxby Downs.
Now to famous Louth. See David Houston’s comments attached to the post below. Sounds like a
good time was definitely had by all 7,000 people, or was someone seeing double? !! I wonder if there was a booze bus outside the track. I wonder if there was anything outside the track, or if the pilots had to blow into the bag before taking their planes back home? (some of the Louth crowd, right - the queue for the loo?).Greg Ryan’s following in the bush ensured $3.00 favouritism for Intheway (6g Intergaze-Getting Ahead) and the bookies were done over once again when the pair strolled home a length and three-quarters to the good of my old mate Rocking On (NZ), a one-time promising stayer who succumbed to a wind problem. The formline was strong – Intheway was coming off a resolute ninth of 10, beaten 8.5 lengths, in a 1465m handicap at Wondai, Queensland. Just prior to that he had finished second of six in the Cup at the Wean picnics, carrying the steadier of 69.5 kgs. Wean is a speck on the road between Boggabri and Manilla, in the north-west hinterland behind Tamworth. It’s post code 2382 and, according to the census, 1,487 people inhabit the area covered by post code 2382 of which 96% are Australian born and only 8% profess to have ‘no religion’. Trainer and part-owner Gary Popp obviously doesn’t mind a trip. He trains Intheway at Warwick. Wean is just next door, 497 kms south of Warwick, but Louth is a proper drive, 870 kms south. But what the heck, Queensland fuel is cheaper. The horse obviously returned to the form which won him a $50,000 handicap at Doomben back in February. The drive home, all 870 kms of it, must seem a lot shorter when you’ve got the chocolates. Even if you've had to fill the tank with extortionate 'fuel watch' NSW gas.
Someone whispered to me that there are carnivals about to kick off in Melbourne and Sydney. I'll try and pay attention.
What Petrol Crisis?
Two of the more remote racemeetings in Australia have their big days tomorrow (Saturday 9th).
Louth, a speck on the map on the Bourke-Wilcannia road a mere 830 kms from Sydney, has its annual day. Several thousand will turn up by land and air, a la Birdsville. Stakeswinner Rocking On is topweight in the $16,000 Cup. He was placed last start at Enngonia (sounds like a disease), a dot on the map between Bourke and Cunnamulla. So was another ex-Waterhouse charge, Leewards, topweight in the Ratings 67. Probably the best-bred horse running out there is Let's Bat, a half-brother to Chuckle by Encosta de Lago. His only placing in six attempts has been at aforementioned Enngonia. Looks like Enngonia's the key form line.
It's Broome Cup Day over in WA. I'm picking a lot more people have been to Broome than to Louth, but stuck out where it is Broome is hardly the centre of the racing world. The Cup is worth $70,000 so things must be going good in Broome. Leading Perth trainers Neville Parnham and Adam Durrant have sent up runners, perhaps they're on one-way tickets? Broome is just 2,175 kms from Perth. The youngest horses in the field are a pair of five-year-olds, the oldest is nine. Former eastern staters Call Me Henry (Waterhouse again, 10yo, 20 wins), Stella Regale (9yo, 9 wins) and The Little Tacker (11yo, 13 wins) are in the feature sprint. Should be a pearler of a day.
Appropriately situated, for this weekend, on the Olympic Way (10 kms south of the world's largest known uranium deposit at Olympic Dam) is Roxby Downs which also races Saturday. However, this is much closer to town, only 530 kms north of Adelaide. It's a modern metropolis compared to Louth, with about 4,000 people, one-third of whom are under 15 years old. Roxby Downs was created from scratch in 1987 by a joint venture between the State Government and the Olympic Dam mining company. It draws on Strathalbyn, Gawler and Murray Bridge horses to fill the fields. There are only two non-claiming jockeys riding at the meet, Philip Crich and Tamara Zanker.
It's Cairns Cup on Sunday. Bruce McLachlan has sent up a team, including the Cup topweight In Rehearsal. It's only a leisurely 1,610 kms from Bruce's place to Cairns.
Louth, a speck on the map on the Bourke-Wilcannia road a mere 830 kms from Sydney, has its annual day. Several thousand will turn up by land and air, a la Birdsville. Stakeswinner Rocking On is topweight in the $16,000 Cup. He was placed last start at Enngonia (sounds like a disease), a dot on the map between Bourke and Cunnamulla. So was another ex-Waterhouse charge, Leewards, topweight in the Ratings 67. Probably the best-bred horse running out there is Let's Bat, a half-brother to Chuckle by Encosta de Lago. His only placing in six attempts has been at aforementioned Enngonia. Looks like Enngonia's the key form line.
It's Broome Cup Day over in WA. I'm picking a lot more people have been to Broome than to Louth, but stuck out where it is Broome is hardly the centre of the racing world. The Cup is worth $70,000 so things must be going good in Broome. Leading Perth trainers Neville Parnham and Adam Durrant have sent up runners, perhaps they're on one-way tickets? Broome is just 2,175 kms from Perth. The youngest horses in the field are a pair of five-year-olds, the oldest is nine. Former eastern staters Call Me Henry (Waterhouse again, 10yo, 20 wins), Stella Regale (9yo, 9 wins) and The Little Tacker (11yo, 13 wins) are in the feature sprint. Should be a pearler of a day.
Appropriately situated, for this weekend, on the Olympic Way (10 kms south of the world's largest known uranium deposit at Olympic Dam) is Roxby Downs which also races Saturday. However, this is much closer to town, only 530 kms north of Adelaide. It's a modern metropolis compared to Louth, with about 4,000 people, one-third of whom are under 15 years old. Roxby Downs was created from scratch in 1987 by a joint venture between the State Government and the Olympic Dam mining company. It draws on Strathalbyn, Gawler and Murray Bridge horses to fill the fields. There are only two non-claiming jockeys riding at the meet, Philip Crich and Tamara Zanker.
It's Cairns Cup on Sunday. Bruce McLachlan has sent up a team, including the Cup topweight In Rehearsal. It's only a leisurely 1,610 kms from Bruce's place to Cairns.
Snow Then Water
Peter Snowden is a clear-cut favourite to take out this season's Sydney trainers' premiership, according to respondents to the recent poll on this blog. Darley's No. 1 trainer got 60% of the votes ahead of I'll-train-for-anyone Gai Waterhouse with 27%. Patinack's supremo Anthony Cummings and Bob Ingham's find Chris Waller polled 10% between them.
Sheikh Mohammed owns the first three finishers in the 3YO maiden at Gosford yesterday, all smart types making their debut. But it was the Waterhouse-trained The Flame (colt, Dubai Destination-La Flamina, by Selkirk) who sustained a strong all-the-way gallop to defeat the Snowden pair Borderline (Royal Academy) and Mignard (Strategic). By the aggressive manner of the win, from the outside barrier, I felt sure I could hear Gai back in Sydney saying, with a steely mien, "Your Sheikhness, anything Peter can do, I can do ...."
Completing this fairly remarkable Darley result was the fact that they also bred the fourth placegetter, Andretti. He was sold as a yearling for $120,000.
The race prizemoney swelled the Darley coffers by 51,238 UAE dirhams, equivalent to about five nights at the Burj-Al-Arab.
Sheikh Mohammed owns the first three finishers in the 3YO maiden at Gosford yesterday, all smart types making their debut. But it was the Waterhouse-trained The Flame (colt, Dubai Destination-La Flamina, by Selkirk) who sustained a strong all-the-way gallop to defeat the Snowden pair Borderline (Royal Academy) and Mignard (Strategic). By the aggressive manner of the win, from the outside barrier, I felt sure I could hear Gai back in Sydney saying, with a steely mien, "Your Sheikhness, anything Peter can do, I can do ...."
Completing this fairly remarkable Darley result was the fact that they also bred the fourth placegetter, Andretti. He was sold as a yearling for $120,000.
The race prizemoney swelled the Darley coffers by 51,238 UAE dirhams, equivalent to about five nights at the Burj-Al-Arab.
Now Is The Time To Be Thinking Keeneland November
Frustrated with the cost of breeding prospects spiralling out of all proportion in Australia?
The Keeneland November Breeding Stock Sale represents the prime opportunity to acquire quality breeding stock. Advantages: a vast catalogue, a favourable exchange rate, a currently unsure USA economy.
Last November, I purchased for Australian clients five breeding prospects with impressive pedigrees, the oldest 6YO, at an average US$162,000 – a Group 1 winner, three Stakeswinners and a multiple winner from England.
If you are interested in having me represent you at this important sale, contact me by email at steve.brem@gmail.com. A limited number of commissions accepted.
The Keeneland November Breeding Stock Sale represents the prime opportunity to acquire quality breeding stock. Advantages: a vast catalogue, a favourable exchange rate, a currently unsure USA economy.
Last November, I purchased for Australian clients five breeding prospects with impressive pedigrees, the oldest 6YO, at an average US$162,000 – a Group 1 winner, three Stakeswinners and a multiple winner from England.
If you are interested in having me represent you at this important sale, contact me by email at steve.brem@gmail.com. A limited number of commissions accepted.
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