Bass-Robinson, Van Niekerk split
CANDICE Bass-Robinson has split with her retained stable jockey Grant van Niekerk who is to ride freelance from now on.
Van Niekerk would not comment when contacted yesterday but the Milnerton trainer said: “We have decided that we are going to go our separate ways. Grant is going to go freelance and we will also freelance [as regards jockeys] for a while.
“There are no hard feelings or anything like that. It’s just that we decided that this might be best, and we will see how we go from here.”
Mike Bass caused some surprise when he picked Van Niekerk to be his number one two and a half years ago.
Just turned 23, the rider was young and comparatively inexperienced compared with the likes of Karl Neisius and Bernard Fayd’Herbe whose boots he was being asked to fill.
But he slipped into the job as if it had been made for him, promptly put himself into the 100-plus winner-a-season bracket and won both the 2015 Paddock and Majorca for the stable on Inara.
Last season was even better. He won three more at the very top level on Inara as well as the Champions Cup on Marinaresco after so nearly snatching the Vodacom Durban July on the three-year-old.
Sun Met Day
The stable seemed to take a little while to hit top form this season - Mrs Robinson’s first at the helm – but the horses were really motoring by Sun Met day.
Marinaresco might have failed to produce his very best in the big one but Nightingale gave her trainer her first Grade 1 in the Klawervlei Majorca .
True, the stable jockey went for the wrong one –Silver Mountain was only fifth – but the pair shared in a lucrative CTS $500 000 with Live Life.
Aldo Domeyer has long been a key player in the Bass Racing riding arrangements but he has commitments to Sabine Plattner and Andre Nel that seem to take priority.
Certainly Mrs Robinson’s phone looks like being hot with jockeys suddenly wanting to ride work!
Van Niekerk’s decision to let three interference suspensions roll over until later this month looked a sensible course of action at the time.
Now he is probably wishing to be in the public eye – or at least trainers’ eyes – without that interruption. But he has already shown that he is too good a jockey for this to be much more than a temporary setback.