Ex-NZ mare boss in Sydney Cup
Jockey Glen Boss considered her his best longshot ride in a Group One race and former Kiwi mare Etah James has proven him right, upsetting her more-fancied rivals to win the $NZ1.3m Sydney Cup at Randwick.
Making her debut for cotrainers Ciaron Maher and David Eustace yesterday, the welltravelled mare has spent most of her career in Victoria with Matt Cumani, before a brief stint with part-owner and New Zealand trainer Mark Lupton.
Transferred for a Sydney Cup campaign, Etah James ($14) proved the superior stayer in the stamina-testing edition of the 3200m race.
The victory gave Boss back-toback G1 wins after he took out the Australian Oaks (2400m) on Colette, with Kiwi hope Probabeel well back, and while he feared English visitor and favourite Young Rascal, he had genuine confidence in Etah James.
‘‘I’ve been riding her in work and I trialled her here in a very fast trial and I said, ‘this is just flying this thing’,’’ Boss said.
The win ended a 16-year Sydney Cup drought for Boss, who last won it in 2004 aboard champion stayer Makybe Diva.
Etah James ran her last 600m in a dour 38.66sec to score by a long head over the Murray Baker and Andrew Forsman-trained Kiwi stayer The Chosen One ($18).
Etah James is part-owned and bred by Matamata horseman
Lupton, who trained the sevenyear-old mare to run third in the Avondale Cup (2400m) and fourth in the Auckland Cup (3200m).
Celebrations are in-house for the time being, but Lupton was overwhelmed with the volume of messages he has already received.
‘‘I think the local Italian eatery might be getting booked out at some stage and there might be a fair old party.’’
■ KIWI mare Verry Elleegant took her earnings past $3m with a game second to British raider Addeybb in the $2.3m QEII Stakes.
Part-owned in New Zealand, she unwound strongly to grab second, just ahead of Danon Premium. Matamata stablemates Te Akau Shark and Melody Belle were game in fourth and fifth.
“I am sure the Melbourne Cup [November] is where she is going and it would be bloody beautiful if the internationals didn’t come,” said breeder and part-owner Don Goodwin.
Donald Trump has said that the new NFL season should start on time and so it comes to pass. The 42-year-old Tom Brady reaches into his locker and pulls out a cap that he used to wear a few years back. His supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen had told Brady that the cap would be a good fit as he readied to sweep down the drive of the multimillion dollar mansion he has been renting off baseball mate Derek Jeter.
And so on September 10, 2020, Brady runs out onto the pitch wearing a ‘‘Make America Great Again’’ cap, a seemingly bashful hand raised in acknowledgement of the people. The crowd at the Ray Jay stadium stand to worship their new quarterback. ‘‘Normalcy’’ has returned to the good old US of A.
It is of course a rich crowd. The poor people of Florida have been doing too much dying to make it to a football game. But the show must go on. The economy must resume. The Glazer brothers, who own the Bucs and Manchester United, have more acquisitions to make and more suckers to exploit. Greed is good again.
A few months earlier, at the height of the Covid pandemic, the NFL had pressed on with the draft at the end of April, via a conference call that seemed to verge on virtual reality. But there was nothing virtual about the money still being paid out. The Cincinnati Bengals picked the 24-year-old quarterback Joe Burrow first out of the draft, paying him $37 million, including a $24m signing fee.
When asked what he was going to do with his new fortune Burrow said: ‘‘Hire a chef. I’m a healthy eater, so whatever he or she can make that tastes good and keeps me shredded. Whoever wants to pay me money to play the game of football, I’ll play for ‘em. It doesn’t matter to me.’’
That made the old guys smile. The kid learns fast. At the other end of the field from Brady is Drew Brees, the 41-year-old quarterback for conference rivals the New Orleans Saints. Age might mean something to Covid, but it means very little on a sports field any more.
These are the new supermen. Scientific advances are allowing sports people to put on more muscle mass, increase stamina and take in more oxygen. 40 is the new 20. Brees and Brady show no sign of retiring. Tiger Woods at the age of 44 is getting ready to return to competitive golf at the Fall Masters. Serena Williams and Roger Federer are looking forward to playing next year’s Wimbledon at the age of 39.
And the sponsors love it. You don’t have to go to the bother of marketing a new name. You sell people the dream of immortality. No-one gets old. Youth lasts forever. Just make sure no one sees the boxes of pharmaceuticals behind the curtain.
Up in their private box, the Glazer brothers rub their hands. In a few years time they will get these suckers to build them another stadium. Your seat will be allocated close to people like you, determined through social media. There will be a personalised video to access and new carbon fibre technology will allow the stadium to morph into a multitude of venues.
The current stadium cost the Glazers $168.5m to build. Only it wasn’t their money. It was publicly financed. Of course it was. The Glazers then sold and sold and sold again the naming rights to Raymond James Financial and New Zealand Rugby genuflects and thinks this is how sport should be run. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a crash.
THIRTY years ago I would drive around London’s North Circular Road and bear off towards Southgate, a dreary suburb that was two stops from the end of the Piccadilly line. On a grey day it could seem like two stops from the end of the world.
From memory the club, which was founded in 1876 by the Old Boys of the Philological School, Marylebone, was at a place called Bramley Road. For a time the facilities were so bad that several first-class rugby clubs would not play Saracens.
But when I went there at the beginning of the 1990s the club had a rickety charm. The old wooden stand would start to shake when the men in black were on a roll. And they were frequently on a roll.
Captained by Floyd Steadman, a black halfback who played the game with a shrewd courage, they also had future Lions like Jason Leonard and Ben Clarke. Saracens kept tipping over swankier opposition and afterwards the clubrooms would be a hub-bub.
There was nothing to those rooms. You would find the same in clubs up and down the land. A few photos, a bit of lino and a bar with plenty of beer. But it was a place you could chat with anyone. Coach Mark Evans became a friend. Referee Ed Morrison, a down-to-earth west country lad who would go on to referee the ‘95 World Cup final, would be there with a pint and a smile.
And this was how rugby was. My father treasured everything that it stood for and fought with his dying breath against the perversions of professionalism. No doubt he raised an eyebrow from the grave when the new, greedy, corporate Saracens, who now play at the Allianz stadium, were found guilty of cheating and paying their players too much.
But at the time, young and naive, I disagreed with my dad. I said that professionalism was inevitable and so we had better make the most of it. Perhaps that was right. But is anything inevitable. If to be human means anything, then surely we have an element of free will. If modern professional rugby is a grotesque perversion of the game that once was, why then do we put up with it.
And we have a chance now, when the world starts again, to at least restore some of rugby’s humanitarian past, a past that Peter FitzSimons recently wrote about when he touched on how his generation gave back to the game and were better, far better, for the experience.
With any luck half of the clubs in Britain and France will go bust in the coming months and the unions of those countries can take charge of the game again by contracting the top players. The unions of the world will have to cut back. Some players will be part time. They seek out proper jobs to subsidise their income. Super Rugby, which is dying anyway, will be broken because Australia cannot afford to carry on.
And so New Zealand can return its top players to the provincial game. We can return the top players to the people. There will be no more selfies with a fawning member of the public and move on. They players, unburdened by sponsors, will have a beer and talk to the public. And the great tours will resume. The All Blacks can go to world champions South Africa for three months, play the provinces and get to know the land.
Player power will ebb as salaries are slashed after public outrage at subsidising NZR during the pandemic in an echo of what is now happening around the world. The people are taking charge. They have decided to go out again. Golf courses are on the rise and TV audiences have collapsed. The public want to be doing, they don’t want to be watching.
Britain’s football teams become more like Sheffield United, nurseries for local players, and many of the foreign stars go home. The Ryder Cup, postponed for 12 months, happily returns to odd numbered years when it is not clashing with the football World Cup or the Olympics. And as America’s economy collapses, the PGA Championship is scrapped and Asia is set to host its first major.
Older players have had time to realise that there is more to life than biffing a ball and so they retire. Roger Federer and Tiger Woods publicly announce that they will be playing their final major tournament. Young players start to emerge again. There is a feeling of Spring, of a resurgent youth. The world is reborn.