Winter Comes Quickly

Mile In Style! Variety Club draws clear under Anton Marcus to win the Gr3 Winter Guineas.

A sophisticated well-paid grass gallop. That about sums up the emphatic victory of the brilliant three year old Variety Club in the R184 000 Gr3 Tekkietown Winter Guineas run over 1600m at Kenilworth today.

Racing certainties may exist only in legend, but Joey Ramsden’s smashing Var colt confirmed his superiority with an air of arrogance that bordered on the sublime. Starting at 1-5, he overcame the widest draw to cruise home in a race he was always destined to win.

Keeping our feet firmly on the ground, we will remind ourselves again that there were no real stars amongst the eight hopefuls that lined up today. On the flipside of the coin, Variety Club was returning from an 84 day rest after a fairly tough summer campaign. He didn’t do a lot of racing, but he dived straight into the deep end and bumped the best every time he saw action.

Winter Warmers! Racing Manager Derek Brugman and Breeder Anton Shepherd lead the magic miler

Everybody wants to lower a champion’s colours and Ramsden would have borne that reality in mind when he looked at the betting, sobered by the level weight terms that his star met his rivals on today.  He shouldn’t have got beaten, and he didn’t.

Anton Marcus used his mount’s terrific gate-speed to overcome the draw and he tracked the pacemaking Stone Pine to halfway down the home straight, before turning on the jets, and it was race over. It was really that simple. Variety Club won in a not extended time of 97,92 secs.

Vaughan Marshall’s Tribal Dance kicked on smartly late but was no threat and he finished 2,25 lengths adrift. He will be a fair Winter Derby runner on this performance. Only 9,10 lengths covered the whole field, with Final Button and Master Plan running a fair third and fourth respectively. Soweto Slew and Winter Migrant disappointed.

The winner was bred by Beaumont Stud, and a proud Anton Shepherd was on hand to share the lead-in formalities with long-time Ramsden assistant trainer, Ricardo Sobotker.  With his boss out of town in Johannesburg for the grind of the National Yearling Sale inspection week, a proud Avo(as Sobotker is known to most of those around him), explained that Variety Club is ‘a very hot horse’ and was quite full of nonsense. He acknowledged the hours of hard work put in by South Africa’s leading horse behaviouralist, Malan Du Toit, over the past six months. Sobotker said that Du Toit’s work had made the world of difference and remarked that the colt had been relaxed in the pre-race build up.

The whole world knows by now that the Cape’s favourite son, Variety Club, is by the fastest rising star on our stallion scene, Var, out of the Secret Prospector mare, La Massine. He has won five Graded races amongst his seven winning performances from his twelve starts for stakes of R1 587 000.

Golden Dawn wins Sweey Chestnut Stakes

The way he won today, we wouldn’t want to lay odds against him emulating the Winter Triple Crown champion, Pocket Power. Heaven help the Champions Season three year old hopefuls though. If Ramsden decides to travel and target the Gold Challenge, amongst one or two other plums, the Durbanites may just have to settle for less.

The R115 000 Listed Sweet Chestnut Stakes was run as a supporting feature and provided the Glen Kotzen Racing team with a welcome feature winner. Karis Teetan rode a confident race on the Jaffee family and Peter De Beyer owned Goldmark filly, Golden Dawn, who shot clear with 200m to go. The longtime pacemaker Ocean’s Swift had no chance with the winner, but clung on to second after becoming one-paced late.

The Nutfield Stud -bred winner is out of the Elliodor mare Pearl Hostess. This was Golden Dawn’s second win from ten starts and she looks a solid improver with lots to come. She is very versatile too.

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