The Cape Racing dissemination team found themselves taking a few blows to the head from Tellytrack present Alistair Cohen on a sunny boxing day at Kenilworth on Saturday.
Cohen performs his in-studio tasks with as much zeal and polish as he does his on-course commentaries and announced his ‘annoyance’ after the running of the day’s feature the Listed Southeaster Sprint.
Anton Marcus produces Elusive Trader at the right moment (Pic – Chase Liebenberg)
The result was tight for third and fourth and Tellytrack were given a result.
“We all heard it clearly!” he said.
When Cohen checked the TAB results a few moments later he found it differed.
He then got the studio staff to contact the course who apologised and said they got it wrong.
This was however, not the end of the story as the mind changers at Kenilworth then went back to what seemed to be their original call of the race when providing the all-clear.
“This is not a game of broken telephone. When we asked them at the end all they could say was sorry! It’s highly annoying.”
The communication issue from Kenilworth started before the first with the runners in the parade ring with only seven minutes to go before the race with nobody knowing why.
Then before the third race we were past race time and were watching what appeared to be rails and starting stalls being moved.
“Not a squeak from Kenilworth” said a frustrated Cohen to his hapless viewers.
A bright spot on the day however was the repeat victory of defending champion Elusive Trader who pounced under a superbly judged ride by Anton Marcus to win the Southeaster Sprint for second year running.
The 5yo son of Elusive Fort clocked 65,83 secs for his dream distance of 1100m and came home solidly at 6/1 to beat the pacey Constable by a half-length.
Star Grooms big winner – Alfred Mayekiso, Greg Ennion stables
The result that had the flummoxed judges changing their saw Cartel Captain being awarded third in front of Captain Tatters.
Bred by Terry Andrews the winner is by the Var one-time victress Armatrading.
Trained by Greg Ennion, Elusive Trader has won four races with thirteen places from twenty-eight starts for over R1.5 Million in stakes.
It was must have been a tough day for the injured M J Byleveld to watch from the sidelines as he rode the R24 286 jackpot – including Elusive Trader – on this day last year.
