Queen of the turf Winx owes a lot to Vegas Showgirl

If you’d selected and bought Winx as an agent, A$13 million down the line you’d come up with a long list of magical reasons for the selection.

Lovely head, bright eye, deep shoulder, enormous girth, walks like an angel.

Even if none of those things were true.

None of them were true when New Zealand bloodstock agent Guy Mulcaster paid A$230,000 for Winx as a yearling at the Gold Coast sales on behalf of his mate Chris Waller.

What Mulcaster liked most about Winx, he told the Herald yesterday, was not on show — her dam Vegas Showgirl.

“I loved the fact her mother was so tough and versatile. She’d been to a lot of dances [racedays], and she could run in any sort of footing. And she won in New Zealand and Australia.”

Most believed Winx’s great class allowed her to get through extremely heavy tracks on two occasions in the past six weeks when, in fact, that ability has come through Vegas Showgirl.

Trained by Graeme Rogerson, Vegas Showgirl raced nine times at two, the last of them against the older horses when a close second in the weight-for-age Rotorua Stakes. She won seven races and $209,206, which included the Soliloquy and the WRC Galaxy Stakes.

She raced six times on slow and heavy tracks for a record of five wins and a second.

You can’t pick a physical fault in Winx — nor should you be able to in a A$230,000 yearling — but you don’t look at her and go “Wow”.

If you do it’s because now you realise she’s won 17 straight and A$12,893,430 and we’re all still counting.

But like her rider Hugh Bowman, Winx just goes out there and does her job with a minimum of fuss. The Bowman interview by the mounted Bernadette Cooper one minute after Saturday’s A$4 million Queen Elizabeth Stakes was priceless.

Bernie, as she’s known, asked

I loved the fact her mother was so tough and versatile. She’d been to a lot of dances [racedays], and she could run in any sort of footing. Guy Mulcaster

Bowman if he’d given any thought to the possibility of the Queen having watched the race named in her honour.

There are any number of glib Australian jockeys that would have turned that into a smart joke. Bowman said, dry as ever: “Well, if she did I hope she enjoyed it. I did.”

The interview ended with Bowman saying, simply: “I love her.” That would be like someone else gushing for 10 minutes.

As outstanding as the win looked on Saturday, Bowman was adamant it could have looked even better had the race been run to suit the glittering mare. “They sat and sprinted home. You won’t see the best of her until they run a real pressure race with the pace on, like last year’s Cox Plate.” It looked pretty good to us. Truth be known there would have been a few tears in the grandstand and even Chris Waller reverted to his quivering bottom lip as he described what the victory meant to him. Waller underlined the point that there is a public perception trainers take horses home after a race, lock them in a box and bring them out for the next raceday.

“There is so much that goes on behind the scenes,” said Waller. What he was trying to explain with that, and “I’ve been nervous for a year now,” was that so much can go wrong with thoroughbreds.

Forty minutes later the world caught up with the meaning when European import Almoonqith broke a leg and crashed with a round to go in the A$2 million Sydney Cup, throwing his English jockey James Doyle heavily and dislodging Blake Shinn from the Waller-trained Who Shot Thebarman.

Almoonqith was euthanised and the event was called a no-race by stewards. It could have been Winx. That’s what Waller was meaning.