Johnson’s hot Foxbridge tip: Advantage Avantage
Speed machine: Premiership winner ready to roll sausage dog and nonplussed by wide draw
Premiership winner Danielle Johnson believes the delayed running of tomorrow’s $110,000 Foxbridge Plate at Te Rapa has improved Avantage’s chances of defending her title.
And it has helped Johnson as she wasn’t even going to ride the wonderful mare had the race been held as programmed last Saturday.
The extension of Covid-19 alert level 4 last Friday saw the meeting pushed back a week and the new Auckland boundaries released this week have trapped champion jockey Opie Bosson in the level 4 locked down region rather than in Waikato.
With Bosson sidelined Avantage’s other regular rider Johnson hops back on the odds-on favourite for the first Group 2 race of the season tomorrow, which the market suggests will be dominated by Avantage and Tavi Mac.
Apart from being chuffed to be back on Avantage, and her exciting stablemate Imperatriz in the $80,000 Cambridge Breeders Stakes tomorrow, Johnson says the extra week has done the nine-time Group 1 winner no harm.
“It has meant a couple more gallops under her belt before the first race of the season, and it all helps,” Johnson said yesterday. “I galloped her this morning [Thursday] and she felt very sharp.
“She is ready to go well and the extra week probably helps us more than Tavi Mac because he had had a lead-up race.”
What may not help is Avantage drawing wide tomorrow and Tavi Mac the ace, a reversal of their draws last week but Johnson is nonplussed.
“She has the speed to go forward early if that is what we decide to do but with a fair bit of speed drawn down inside us they might go hard and being two or three back, one off would be a good place to be too.”
Avantage has beaten Tavi Mac all three times they have met and while he looks set to get a beautiful run on the rail close to the speed, any drying of the track would seem to favour the mare more than the equine sausage dog.
That is not so much because Tavi Mac is a duffer on good tracks but he is unbeaten on soft or heavy tracks whereas Avantage has won two Telegraphs and a Railway on good tracks as well as beating Tavi Mac on a dead6 in this race last year.
Tomorrow is undoubtedly Tavi Mac’s best chance to get some revenge but, barrier draws aside, just by their stats the closer to the track gets to a dead6 the more it should help Avantage.
Johnson has also picked up the ride on Imperatriz, who will start odds-on in the Breeders Stakes, even hotter than last week as stablemate Palamos is not in this week’s version.
“She is very good, one of those horses like Entriviere that you really don’t realise how fast they are going because they do it so easily,” said Johnson.
“I worked her on Tuesday and she is ready to go. She will need to be because it is a good field but I think she is one of the most exciting young horses in the stable.”
On the subject of Entriviere, the Matamata mare showed she was over a recent hoof problem with a strong 1050m trial win at Randwick yesterday, while stablemate Amarelinha was third in the next trial, with both mares to race in Sydney this month.