Rogue shows her best behaviour
Smith’s mare responds to a gentler touch
WORD spreads quickly in the racing world.
And when Geelong trainer Kelvin Smith arrived at the races with his stable’s latest acquisition, Astro Miss, everyone shared the same opinion.
That was until they actually saw her.
“Everywhere we go there’s someone who says, ‘She’s mad, she’s mad’,” Smith said.
“It doesn’t matter where we go, a dozen people come up and say, ‘What have you done? — she’s not the same horse, she used to kick and do this and do that.’
“They say, ‘What have you done to her?’ and I say, ‘ We haven’t seen that side of her.’
“When we got the horse she was out of control. She was a mad bolter and she’d been doing the same thing all of her life, I’m tipping.
“When I first got on her in the bullring you would have thought I was out on a racetrack. All she wanted to do was go and it took all of my energy to get her to canter.
“She didn’t know how to trot or anything.
“We just clicked and she has a bit of a routine and she’s finding a bit of her old form.”
Smith has Astro Miss purring again.
The seven-year-old mare is up to her fifth trainer in a 51start career that has spanned three states, but not since her early days at Lee Freedman’s has she raced so well.
Smith said he doesn’t have any secret formulas to help get a horse’s head back in the game, but he said his intellectually disabled son Nathan had been crucial to turning her form around.
“My young bloke gets on well with her,” Smith said.
“He might be a little bit of a key to her. You know how horses can react to people and they get on like a house on fire.
“She talks to him, they have their arguments, but they get on well.
“We don’t do anything out of the ordinary with her. She has her routine and we do a lot of swimming with her.”
Astro Miss’s owner had pushed for Smith to take over training duties. A mate at the pub had put the two in touch, but the on-course trainer was hesitant.
Persistence paid off and Astro Miss moved to Geelong.
“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,” Smith said.
“A mate was haunting me about the horse. He was telling me his mate had a horse.
“A few months went by and the bloke rang me — and this was the horse.”
Astro Miss, who has won at benchmark 70 level and raced in the city, will contest the benchmark 64 Farrah Dobell High Kick handicap (1135m) at Geelong today.
Smith is expecting a bold performance from her with Jye McNeil riding from barrier three.
“I’ve got no doubt about it,” he said when asked if she were good enough to win today.
Astro Miss heads into the race in good form after a nice win at Hamilton last start.
That victory was Smith’s first as a trainer in almost 12 months. It’s fair to say the veteran trainer needed the result.
“I needed it mentally and financially,” he said.
Smith says he’s confident that if Astro Miss repeats that Hamilton performance at Geelong today she will be around the money.
A victory, and maybe the local trainer can start to aim even higher.
“She is showing all the signs,” Smith said.
“Today is a big day to show us where she is at. “I can’t fault her.” GEELONG FORM
PAGES 30-31