Hardern ready to roll
AN out of the blue phone call from a North Queensland leviathan owner has handed Townsville horse trainer Michael Geaney a serious contender for the 2019 carnival.
Cairns’ Tom Hedley could not tell the Jensen horseman the name of his about to be new stable arrival at first but he could not hide his excitement when the Cairns Jockey Club president finally revealed his name – Hardern.
While most of Hedley’s massive team of horses head to the Tablelands with Roy Chillemi or Cannon Park with Stephen Massingham, the beaches of Townsville are the new home for Hardern.
“I am not sure how I got this horse to be honest,” Geaney said.
“I trained Profound Choice for him after carnival last year and somehow Tom rang me up five weeks ago and said ‘I have another 2000m horse, do you want to train him?’
“I obviously said we would take him on.
“The moment he told me the name of the horse and I looked him up online, I thought this was the ideal horse for here.
“He is perfect, big, powerful and strong.
“I take my horses to the beach to work there a lot and we will do the same with him.”
Hardern comes to the North with an excellent career record, running a place in the Group 2 Alister Clark Stakes in 2016, as well as six other victories. The air conditioner repairer now has his eyes on winning back-toback Townsville Cups after Hardern scored a sensational win in last month’s North Queensland Cup Open Handicap (1609m) at Cluden Park.
Before that, his task is the $150,000 Mackay Cup this afternoon, before likely tilts at the Cairns Amateurs Cup following the Townsville Cup.
“When he got off the track a few weeks ago, you could see he had a certain arrogance about him,” Geaney said. “He had the attitude of ‘this is going to be my stable from now on’.”
Meanwhile, Cairns-owned Monsieur Gustave will start in this afternoon’s $75,000 Mackay Newmarket.
Cairns jockey Michael Murphy will ride the top weights in both the feature races at Mackay today.