Winx and Belle spring into action
Aussie champ eyes record and it’s blue blood on show at Te Rapa
Mike Dillon
Winx and Foxbridge, name-carriers of the biggest two races on opposite sides of the Tasman today, are both Hall Of Famers.
The comparison ends there. Winx should clock up a record 26 straight wins in the race named in her honour at Randwick this afternoon while Foxbridge won just one race.
But he was far from a failure. Bought cheaply out of England by Seton Otway of Cambridge’s Trelawney Stud, Foxbridge had a sway back, but was otherwise a magnificent thoroughbred with strength to burn.
The class he injected into his sons and daughters took him to 11 straight sires’ premierships and the same number as champion broodmare sire.
Class, as they say, is permanent and Melody Belle, the only Foxbridge runner today with that sire’s blood in her veins, can honour her great, great dam sire three times removed with victory.
And Winx can do the same in honour of her own name to surpass the mighty Black Caviar’s record of 25 straight victories.
Black Caviar’s former trainer Peter Moody says he will be one of the loudest to cheer Winx to achieve her record, as does one of Black Caviar’s senior owners Neil Werret.
That’s horse racing at its most magnificent. After all, does a record, which can only be recorded in books, stand comparison to watching another champion strut her stuff through the pain barrier and yet again into the hearts of true thoroughbred lovers. Not even close.
There is this lovely yet somewhat oddball connection at the top end of every sport. We’ve said it before in this column, when Steve Smith and David Warner return to the Australian test cricket team — and they will — and score their comeback centuries, the applause will last 10 minutes.
And when Nash Rawiller, being held in Hong Kong without his passport while police investigate charges he participated in betting, rides his first winner back in Sydney, punters will line the rails to cheer him.
They did that when Chris Munce, now training in Queensland, returned from Hong Kong, where he did jail time for the same charges hanging over Rawiller.
One of this writer’s most abiding moments of racing is after Sunline’s attempt to win her third Cox Plate, her final raceday appearance, in which she finished a gallant fourth to arch rival, West Australian champ Northerly.
Northerly’s trainer, master horseman Fred Kersley, had just achieved a lifetime ambition, but when he arrived at the Moonee Valley weighin as saddles were being removed, he did not go the Northerley’s stall, but to Sunline’s where he embraced part owner and trainer Trevor McKee with: “She’s been a great mare, Trevor.”
Six words that meant an entire book of prose. And praise.
Can there be a better endorsement than the complete admiration of your opposition.
There are not words to suitably praise what New Zealand’s Chris Waller has achieved in training in Australia. Knighthoods have been handed out for half as much.
Yet Waller is modest to a fault. Perhaps the lid being firmly held tight is self-preservation because the former kid from Foxton is hugely emotional in his moments of glory.
These days he hides it beautifully, but a meltdown is only a heartbeat away.
There is a bit of irony here because that self imposed modesty rubs off on to all of us and we tend to slightly, even if only slightly, underestimate what is really being achieved here with Winx. It is actually stupendous.
Hugh Bowman treads the same path in Winx’s saddle. The downhome personality masks so many of the enormous subtleties being achieved aboard the champion mare. Bowman is a magician riding in a pool of world class jockeys.
This is racing history that will outlast the next century.
In reality, it is the stuff of dreams. Perhaps we need to break out and realise Waller’s “Oh well, anyone could do this job” is BS. If anyone has managed a champion’s career better, no one can come up with a name.
Champion ability will overcome almost any opposition, but without immaculate management it will eventually turn to dust. For that read Waller and the McKees’ management of Sunline.
Today there will be no dust in sight as Winx walks out on to Randwick, a surface Sunline made her own a decade and a half ago. Go Winx.
And go Melody Belle for the old fella of the 1930s and ’40s.
Spring racing is here.