Trotting champ chasing $1m milestone in first visit to Geelong
CHAMPION trotter Tornado Valley’s first trip down the freeway to Geelong could be a historic one.
The 10-time Group 1 winner and former Inter Dominion champion is poised to smash through the $1m prizemoney barrier if he wins the Group 3 Sundons Gift Trotters’ freefor-all at Geelong’s Beckley Park on Saturday night.
It would make Tornado
Valley just the third Aussietrained trotter to top $1m in earnings.
It would be an incredible achievement given Tornado
Valley’s distinct hatred for long float trips or plane flights that has prevented him from racing outside Victoria in the three years or so since trainer Andy Gath bought him from NZ.
“We haven’t that luxury of chasing the big races wherever they are. He struggles with a float trip to Ballarat (45 minutes from Gath’s Melton stables), let alone taking him to Sydney or flying him across for the big NZ races,” Gath said.
Despite that, Tornado Valley has been universally considered Australia’s, and sometimes Australasia’s, best trotter for much of the past three years. And his recent form and heat and final win in our biggest trotting race, the Great Southern Star, moved the notoriously hard judge Gath to declare him only the second “champion” he had trained in a 30-year career.
“La Coocaracha was a freak (trotter) and she’s been my benchmark, but Tornado Valley’s done it all and kept coming back season after season. He’s a champion in every possible way,” Gath said.
“He’s not flashy, you’d call him a bit of a working class hero, but he’s a nine-year-old now and has won three of his past four starts. He’s racing and working as well as ever.”
But Gath and wife, Kate, who co-trains and drives Tornado Valley, almost retired Tornado Valley in January – just weeks before arguably his greatest triumph when he successfully defended his Great Southern Star crown.
“He just wasn’t right and we were so close to pulling the pin after everything he’d done for us, but we changed a few things with his training and it completely turned him around,” Gath said. “It’s giving us the confidence to think he might have a flat patch here and there at his age, but we can get him through it as we did then.”