If you are going to call it Australia’s best race, you’d better produce the receipts, and a few of them.
No problems say The Valley crew.
We’ve got four with Winx’s name on them, or what about three from The King, even when he couldn’t win.
Then there’s that one from Dulcify when he took The Babe for a spin, did you think Bart could do it twice with So You Think as part of his legendary five, Northerly fighting like a tiger – twice - and that’s only in recent times.
Before the race was even that, we had Phar Lap and Rising Fast, Tulloch Tobin Bronze and Flight so looking pretty good, especially for a race that was once merely an understudy to the Gold Cup on the card.
He was some smart man that William Samuel Cox, who turned over his Kensington Park track back in the 1880’s to lease the land that is now The Valley, not that he, but it was his family, who got to see that first Cox Plate “pop-up” back in 1922.
And year on year since, somehow the script is never dull or predictable even, Shakespearean theatre like Super Impose saving the best Cox Plate field assembled from disaster after Naturalism and two others fell, or heavyweight champs Bonecrusher and Our Waverley Star slugging it out, punch drunk like to the final bell. (“Bonecrusher, legless but still standing”, wrote Les Carlyon).
The storylines always hungrily rich, the territory and the vista may be on the change, but not what makes Australia’s best race work and tick.
You can tagline “the greatest two minutes in sport”, but while that’s thoroughly modern mantra stuff, clickbaitish even, it’s a little too cute and almost a little too dismissive in trying to sum up the annual editions of the Cox Plate.
You got a 3.16s encore then in Saturday’s headline act from Romantic Warrior, that’s how long the race took (2.3.16s), but not the show, and for me, that is what makes the Cox Plate, not just Australia’s best race, but something more, it’s the theatre, the entertainment, the build-up, the rumbling, the rough and tumble, the glory and then what might have beens.
Of course there is that cauldron, not even lost in the building site around the track, as close to a rock concert or a footy match as they players white line it onto the track, the days of Valley spruiker Gary Gray in a jacket looking borrowed from a yacht club squadron announcing them, most with tribal cheers, some (like Shane Dye) with expected boos, now gone but replaced by singalongs to “Horses”, liven it all up before that two minutes even starts, And then it is on!
You are hard pressed to find a dud winner and if some Santa Claus denier throws up Rising Prince, remind them he won the McKinnon the following week.
The South China Morning Post could have been a little more excited for their home-town hero Romantic Warrior, “the first Hong Kong winner of Australasia’s unofficial weight-for-age championship.”
“Unofficial?”
Mind you it didn’t even make front page news in the SCMP, where racing is the number one sport. At least Hong Kong race caller Toto Wong produced a livelier delivery from The Valley.
Still, Romantic Warrior ran a $2.8 winner on the World Pool against a freely available $3.6 fixed or better, that’s the world pool (from Hong Kong), where the duet (have you ever had one?) pool virtually matches the quinella.
Talking of the world though, for those who like to measure racing like accountants with numbers, The Cox Plate was #23 on the world’s highest rated races last year, but #1 in Australia, again it is much more than that and much more than Australasia.
Try Adelaide (Ireland), Sir Dragonet and State of Rest (Ireland), Lys Gracieux (Japan), all winner in the last decade, Benbatyl (UK) testing Winx, Highland Reel (Ireland) placed on his round the world tours.
So Romantic Warrior’s margin was as narrow as a needle and the first seven home, half of those touted as unlucky, could have sat on one of Richie Callander’s picnic blankets, but the winner becomes legendary, and imagine if things had gone right.
We’d endlessly heard he’d missed a trial in Hong Kong, those Racing Victoria scans were intrusive and worrying, then he couldn’t eat, fussy fellow, but couldn’t get an Uber Eats from his favourite restaurant, lost a bit of weight, went to Flemington for the Turnbull only 70 precent fit in trainer Danny Shum’s expectations.
And that’s because those facilities at Werribee weren’t up to scratch, no pools for swimming. No walking machines either, for, well, walking.
“I can’t say I’m happy, but this is only facilities I can use,” Shum was quoted as saying.
Until after the race (when supposedly only near 95 percent fit) that is:
He started off with: “I am Danny Shum from China, Hong Kong, I do not know how to describe how I am feeling right now.”
Danny was once a Hong Kong jockey, rode just 24 winners across six seasons before landing as an assistant to champion trainer Ivan Allen.
The Singapore born Allen, championed global racing, won three premierships in Hnong Kog, multiple in Malaysia and Singapore but owned stars like Commanche Run, an English St Leger winner and was a rather larger than life character. He would have nodded to Shum’s success on the world stage, to which his former protégé was gradually rewarming to.
"I don't know how to tell you how happy I am!"
"I love you; I love you all,” he said in his Jeff Fenech like version of English.
Some journey and some sort of global expedition for Shum, who had done it before when he took Little Bridge to Royal Ascot to win a King’s Stand Stakes, but with prodding from his jockey James McDonald and support from his winner Peter Lau, and some incessant nudging and incentivising from The Valley, Romantic Warrior now sits on Australia’s best race legendary honour board.
"I just have a lot of faith for him, I know there were so many potters out there for him."
Potters have a full-time job in racing, much of it conducted via Twitter or social media.
But sometimes its best to just look at what you’ve seen, experienced and admire what has moved you, the Cox Plate does it again (and that’s even without mentioned Imperatriz).
Then the very next day you see Equinox enhance his immortality in Japan’s Tenno Sho as possibly the best horse we have ever seen, yes Frankel included. Potters, have at that.
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