Tavi Mac ready to close gap
Equine sausage dog arrives in the big time and tomorrow that can get bigger
For most of their lives the gap between Avantage and Tavi Mac has been huge. Avantage is a racing blue blood by Fastnet Rock out of a Zabeel mare, purchased for serious money at the Karaka sales and almost instantly paying it all back.
She won early two-year-old races, then the Karaka Million, has raced the best in Australia and is now a fivetime Group 1 winner looking to defend her title in the $250,000 Telegraph at Trentham tomorrow.
She has won $1,667,851 in her career, which is over seven times more than Tavi Mac.
Although they were born just seven weeks apart in 2015, Tavi Mac’s early story isn’t quite so sexy.
He is a home bred, still owned by breeder Hec McCallum, and didn’t race until April of his three-year-old season.
“Back when Avantage was winning those juvenile races our fella still couldn’t see over the stable door,” says Tavi Mac’s trainer Allan Sharrock.
Even when Tavi Mac improved every start last season and kept on winning, any future comparison with Avantage seemed unfair.
That changed in the Group 2 Foxbridge Plate at Te Rapa on September 5 when Tavi Mac, across the field from barrier 14, worked the hardest in the race and went down by a length to Avantage, and she took most of the straight to get past him.
The little equine sausage dog had arrived in the big time and tomorrow that gets even bigger, with the Telegraph at Trentham one of New Zealand’s iconic races.
So the question on the mind of Sharrock, and plenty of punters, too, is how much has that once-wide gap closed in the four months since Te Rapa?
“I am sure it has closed quite a bit,” says Sharrock. “Our horse has learned to race and how to conserve more energy in a race.
“He is a proper Group 1 horse now, judging by how he beat Callsign Mav last start and while 1400m is probably his better distance the Telegraph (1200m) often races like a 1400m.”
As for Tavi Mac being relatively unproven at weight-for-age, a scale ideally suited to Avantage, Sharrock says now his star is a rating 105 horse, weight-for-age works for him, too.
“I think he can win,” he says. “He is very, very well, he couldn’t be better. And it is not as strong a field as some years.
“He has a perfect draw to sit just off the speed and I think there might not be a lot between him and
Avantage for the whole race. But she is a bloody good mare. So we will find out this weekend how much that gap has closed.”
Avantage is coming off a clinical win in the Railway at Ellerslie and won this race second-up last year,
also coming from a wide barrier, so there is no reason she can’t do it again.
It is hard to make a case for most of tomorrow’s opposition beating her, with the three exceptions of Tavi Mac, two-time Telegraph winner Enzo’s Lad, and Spring Heat, who was third in this race last season and luckless in the Railway.
Avantage faces having to travel wide across the Trentham dogleg and if the leaders kick hard at the 400m those who take the short odds on Avantage might be in for some uncomfortable moments.
She is a hell of a mare and is clearly the one to beat but there are going to be better $1.65 chances racing in the weeks ahead because of the class of horses she is going to have to run past.
There will be plenty of punters willing to take the short odds, even in a multi with stablemate Brando in tomorrow’s Levin Classic, but purely based on price, Avantage may be more fun to watch than to back.