Rainbow Bridge aims for a Winter Series double

STUART Randolph flies down to Cape Town to partner Vodacom Durban July supplementary entry Rocket Countdown for Candice Bass-Robinson in the Grade 3 Highlands Stud Winter Classic over 1 800m at Kenilworth on Saturday. For the first time this year racing switches to the Winter Course with its significantly shorter run-in.

The Selangor winner beat all except the exciting Rainbow Bridge in the Winter Guineas and is 1kg better off for a 1,25-length defeat. Whether that will be enough to turn the table is debatable because the winner looked something out of the ordinary. It was his first run since making a winning debut three weeks earlier and he went from almost last to first in the straight to win pulling up with Richard Fourie immediately talking about having ridden a champion.

Rainbow Bridge seems sure to start favourite and although he is drawn one from the outside, so was he in the Winter Guineas.

He is also favoured by the statistics because four of the last five Winter Guineas winners completed the double and the fifth didn’t run in the Classic. Also the favourite has won three of the last four runnings.

Love Happens and Doublemint, third and fourth in the Winter Guineas, also go again for Justin Snaith who is bidding for a fifth Winter Classic and has won three of the last six.

Joey Ramsden, despite having a good record in the Winter Guineas, has not won this since Winter Solstice 14 years ago but he expects a better run from Ancestry than the horse’s fifth in last month’s race.