All roads lead to the Summer Cup
THE Highveld Spring and Summer feature season will soon be in top gear and all roads will lead to the Sansui Summer Cup which will be celebrating its 130th anniversary this year.
The late racing doyen Jean Jaffee’s book They Raced To Win relates that the first race meeting in Johannesburg was held in the same year as the city’s founding 1886.
The following year the Johannesburg Turf Club (JTC) was formed and a crowd of 3000 attended their first meeting in June 1887 with the main race being the £250 Johannesburg Turf Club Handicap, which is known today as the Summer Cup. The meeting took place over three days on a two mile course and the finishing post was where Commissioner and Eloff Street today intersect.
The winner of the Inaugural Johannesburg Turf Club Handicap was AT Allison’s five-year-old Second.
In the early days, the Johannesburg Handicap was run every time there was a JTC meeting. Therefore, its second running was in December 1887 on a one-anda-half mile horseshoe shaped course near the “Natal Camp.”
By 1994 there were four JTC meetings a year and the big race became known as the Johannesburg Autumn, Winter, Spring or Summer Handicap.
Boer War
The big race was not run in 1900, due to the Boer War, but in 1901 it was run no fewer than ten times and in 1902 seven times.
It then reverted to its four-times a year tradition in 1903.
In 1950 it was run only once a year as the Johannesburg Summer Handicap.
Since then it has also been known as the Holiday Inns, the Sun International, the Administrator’s Champion Stakes, the Administrator’s Cup, the Premier’s Cup, the Champions Stakes and it was finally called the Summer Cup in 2001.
The race was originally run over a mile and it has been run over 2000m since the December 1949 running of the Johannesburg Summer Handicap.
The December 1889 renewal of the big race was held at the third and final home of the Johannesburg Turf Club, a farm called Turffontein, originally leased for £300 a year from a farmer called Rass.
It has been run at Turffontein every year since.
The inaugural Turffontein meeting saw the introduction of the “Tote machine”, brought out from England by William Grey Rattray.
Due to the many runnings per year in the early days, the records of the Summer Cup are skewed. However, a horse called Malgo owned by Messrs Chauncy and Stayt won it five times between 1897 and 1902.
The same pair of owners had won big race with Plum in December 1892 and this horse went on to win The Met among 28 career wins. Another “great” horse to win the big race in its early years was the British-bred Stockwell, not to be confused with the great 1849-born British horse of the same name.
Stockwell
Stockwell owned by AC Harris travelled all over the country and won The Met in 1891 and the Queen’s Plate in 1892.
Earlier in 1892 he had won the Johannesburg Winter Handicap and another big race, the Goldfields Handicap, two days later.
He won the Johannesburg Spring Handicap in 1894.
He was trained by Harry Croon, an English-born jockey who also rode him.
The 1897 Johannesburg Autumn Handicap was significant as two horses, the Abe Bailey-owned Quickmarch and the Solly Joel-owned Lord Ullin deadheated for first, half-a-length clear of Campanajo, who won the inaugural running of today’s premier South African race, the Vodacom Durban July, three months later. Mining magnates Bailey and Joel dominated Johannesburg racing in the 1890s.
Bailey had won six Johannesburg Handicaps by 1897. He left for England in 1898, but returned as a volunteer for British forces in the Boer War. He went on to win “at least twice as many” Johannesburg Handicaps as any other owner and became a major breeder through his stud farm in Colesberg as well as a steward of the SA Jockey Club for 30 years.
Sir Abe also owned horses in England and one of them, the globally influential sire Dark Ronald, who rested on Bailey’s farm at Colesberg for two years as a youngster, later became the five times champion sire of Germany.
Dark Ronald not surprisingly features a number of times in the current SA Champion sire Silvano’s pedigree.
The German-bred Silvano produced two successive Summer Cup winners, Aslan and Flirtation, in 2009 and 2010.
The most famous winner of the Summer Cup is undoubtedly the George Azzie-trained and Dennis and Peggy Mosenthal-owned Elevation, who won it three times in succession from 1972-1974.
He went on to become only the second ever SA-bred horse to become SA Champion stallion.
Pedometer
However, the most famous win of the Summer Cup is likely the Jean Hemingtrained Pedometer’s victory in 1987 as he won by an incredible 14 lengths under Jeff Lloyd.
Heming later won it two years in a row in 1990 and 1991 with the filly Roland’s Song and the following year it was won by the great filly Empress Club, who was trained by Tony Millard.
The Summer Cup gave Mike de Kock his first Grade 1 win in 1989 with Evening Mist and the great trainer has gone on to win it a further eight times.
However, Geoff Woodruff has dominated the race for the last four years and has won it six times in all. Woodruff had the first three past the post in 2013, the first two past the post in both 2014 and 2015 and the first and third last year.
Master Sabina will be attempting to emulate Elevation and Java this year by winning it three years in a row, but he has moved yards to Joe Soma.
Other greats to win the Summer Cup have been Pamphlet (twice July winner), Polystome (eleven-times SA champion sire), Flash On (Summer Cup-July double as a three-year-old), Java (won it three times in a row), Numeral (Summer CupJuly double), Hengist, Caradoc, Home Guard, Furious, Spanish Pool, Enchanted Garden, National Emblem, El Picha, Wolf Whistle, Yorker and Louis The King.