PRIME DISPATCH

Edition 80 – 28/08/2015  Compiled by Joe O’Neill

Hazy Blur wins at Hawkesbury ridden by Brenton Avdulla

12th individual winner of 13 from the crop of 2013

First of two wins for the week!!!

I must say I was expecting Hazy Blur to break her maiden a lot sooner than she did.  She was very good winning at Hawkesbury after getting a number of poor barriers and bad tracks in nearly all her previous starts.  She was the 12th individual winner out of 13 to race in our crop of yearlings purchased in 2013 (Sadly the most expensive colt and filly in this crop died before we could do anything with them).  

Combine this statistic with our class of 2012 where 13 won of the 14 we have 25 winners from 27 to race from our three and four year old crops.  I challenge anyone to beat this record.

She then backed it up 7 days later scoring a strong win at Cessnock in a Class 1 race.  This isn’t easy and Kris Lees deserves all the credit for recommending we back her up and finding the ‘right’ race for the mare.  A week ago she was a maiden and now she has two wins to her credit.  She can go through her grades and it will be interesting to see if she can get over more ground.  All indications are she will.   

The crop of 2013 looks like being one of our best ever with the likes of Hijack Hussy, Savoureux, Husson Eagle, Raido, Rumeron, Bella Venus, Makeadane, Annaman and of course Hazy Blur all being multiple winners with the first three being stakes performers already.  The other winners are Stimuli, Invincible Me and Sitkamose.  I often wonder what might have been had we not lost the two high profile yearlings.    

Congratulations to the owners of Hazy Blur.  They include some of our longest serving clients.  She is a full sister to our good sprinter Too Many Reds and like so many of our horses was reared at Yarraman Park.

I will be running around inspecting some of our Victorian based horses today and will have my feet back under the desk on Monday.  I enjoyed my break.  It has been a very busy year.

THE WEEK AHEAD

Once again bad weather with heavy rain falling across Sydney and surrounds will have an effect on our runners.  As it stands we have Terra Amata at Doomben and Awasita at Rosehill on Saturday.

We have had some nice performances at the barrier trials/jump outs during the past week

VISION OF VICTORIAN RACING

It was terrific to see Victorian Racing back on Sky. Also the new free to air channel is set to commence tomorrow.  In fairness anything that promotes our industry should be given a ‘fair go’ and I hope the coverage on Channel 7 is a roaring success.  They have assembled a good group of presenters with Bruce McAvaney heading up the team.  Good luck to them.  

ROBYN WISHAW – A STAR!!!

I have been lucky enough to meet some great people through racing with none better than the Wishaw family from Tasmania.  At the Tasmanian Awards Dinner on Friday night Robyn Wishaw was inducted as an Associate into the Tasmanian Thoroughbred Hall Of Fame.  I can’t remember a person more thoroughly deserving of this great honour and I’m sure her late husband Dennis would have been chuffed at her induction.

After Dennis’s sudden passing Robyn worked tirelessly to keep Tasmania’s leading thoroughbred nursery Armidale Stud as a going concern through some very tough times for the industry in the Apple Isle.  I had many discussions with her on the best direction for the industry to go and I must say I’ve never met a more tenacious fighter than Robyn.  She is a great credit to herself and I’m certain her children David, Will and Camilla are over joyed that their mother was given the recognition she so rightly deserves.  Great stuff!!!!

BLOODSTOCK.COM.AU

In the past I have highlighted just how useful the bloodstock.com.au site is for people looking at getting involved in racing through a syndication company.  The site is owned by William Inglis and Son and is open to all licenced syndicators. 

On the homepage it lists the last five winners or stakes placed horses for all the syndicators using the site.  It is nice to have three of the five representing our company.  If you are looking at getting into a share in a horse and the syndicator offering the share isn’t availing themselves of this service perhaps you should ask ‘why not’?

All our horses are listed with bloodstock.com.au and I see this as a very transparent way of letting prospective purchasers check how much success you are having. There are some quite notable omissions from the list!!!  

SPRING CARNIVAL

I was thrilled to see Royal Descent win the Warwick Stakes at Randwick last Saturday.  She is an outstanding mare and could well be a real star of the spring.  A word of warning.  I’m treating the form from the Sydney Autumn Carnival very cautiously.  The tracks were heavily rain affected for most of the carnival and I’m certain had we had better tracks the results of most races would have been far different from the outcomes we got.  Given the projected weather pattern for the next few months we should get mainly dry tracks, if anything perhaps too firm.

It is a great honour for a trainer to be given a big race winner to train.  When this horse is a Melbourne Cup winner it is especially significant but to be honest the trainer receiving the horse is under a lot of pressure to try and get the horse back to his previous high performances.  Kris Lees is in such a position with Protectionist.  Nothing went right during the autumn but on the strength of the horse’s good trial on Monday he may well be on his way back.  Let’s hope so.  We wish Kris a highly successful spring, hopefully we will be a part of it.

It is disappointing that we have a really soft track in Sydney tomorrow.  There are some great races scheduled to be run.  Once again the weather is having it’s say on proceedings.