Pacific Dragon claims Ryder Stakes victory

Smart filly Pacific Dragon rounded out a successful juvenile season with another game performance to take out the final black-type event of the 2021-22 racing season, the Listed Ryder Stakes (12,000m) at Te Rapa.

Originally scheduled to run at its traditional Otaki base, the feature event for the two-year-olds was shifted to the Te Rapa meeting after the decision was made early last week to abandon the Otaki meeting due to a waterlogged track and an unfavourable forecast.

That decision played into the hands of the Tony Piketrained daughter of Charm Spirit who wouldn’t have made the trek from Cambridge to contest the race due to the prevailing conditions.

Ridden by the season’s leading rider Michael McNab, Pacific Dragon sat on-speed outside the leader Novella throughout.

McNab opted to stay out in the middle of the track in the home straight and despite being hotly challenged by firstly Winexpress and then the Taranaki visitor Sophmaze in the final stages, kept going strongly to register her first stakes triumph and third career victory.

With Pike in Darwin with wife Kirsten on a belated trip to the popular Northern Territory’s Darwin Cup Carnival, it was left to stable representative Chris McNab, father of jockey Michael, to accept the plaudits after the victory.

Chris McNab was delighted that the filly could put some winning black-type next to her name for her connections after she had been relegated to second in the Group II Eclipse Stakes (1200m) at Ellerslie on New Year’s Day.

The win also lifted champion jockey Michael McNab to 144 wins for the season and importantly it was his 15th stakes victory which lifts him one clear of Opie Bosson as the rider with the most black type wins for the season.

It made for an early winning double for Michael McNab who had earlier saluted aboard the Stephen Marsh-trained Windspeed in race three on the programme. – NZ Racing Desk