By Chris McGrath
The more inspiring the champion, the more prosaic our response seems to be. It is almost as though a horse like Winx (Aus) (Street Cry {Ire}), by absolving us of any hesitation in proclaiming her greatness, blows away all the other habits of circumspection we have learned from lesser performers. As a result we reliably lapse into the same, inane paradox: elevating the horse before our eyes above the fading spectres of champions past, while hardly ever bothering to examine his or her full capacity against those thoroughbreds that are actually still alive.
His palpable greatness saw Frankel (GB) (Galileo {Ire}) routinely pronounced a horse without precedent. But while the condition of his trainer provided a poignant mitigation, the fact remains that he was very conservatively campaigned. And you can't have it both ways. You can't downgrade every champion since Sea-Bird or Seabiscuit simply by doing the same thing, to more or less the same horses, time after time. You have to go looking for trouble; to see if you can find out where your limits might lie. That's why, for instance, everyone thought infinitely more of another wonder-mare by the same sire when she suffered her one and only defeat on her final start. Had Zenyatta (Street Cry {Ire}) ducked the males in the Breeders' Cup Classic, and carried on reiterating her supremacy among her own sex, we would never have known the dramatic scope of her response to adversity. In the case of Winx, happily, we again have a trainer who brings a due sense of humility to the privilege (and, lest we forget, the pressures) of supervising a living icon; while also evincing a wholesome interest in pushing boundaries. As such, Chris Waller hardly needs someone to peer down from the other side of the world with even a syllable of impertinent advice. And if a third Cox Plate is the imprint connections of Winx would most cherish in the annals of the Turf, then who could argue with such a monument to the soundness and durability underpinning her class?
After all, it will always be very hard to haul any Australian champion out of local springtime revels to run at the Breeders' Cup. As Waller recently remarked to TDN, that is where you would “maybe need to be lucky enough to have two Winxs” – his tone wryly acknowledging the remoteness of this contingency. In the same interview, however, he confirmed his interest in one day taking Winx overseas. Royal Ascot was clearly towards the front of his mind, albeit Black Caviar (Aus) (Bel Esprit {Aus}) was evidently at the back of it as he specified that he would want to give Winx a full local prep, rather than run off the plane. Waller has played so unsurprisingly faultless a hand in sustaining her brilliant spree that the where and the how could not be in better hands. All I know is that we should all be enormously grateful – not least those blessed to see her in the flesh, whether in England, California or Timbuctoo – if this stupendous mare is some day tested against a different herd in a different environment. On that day, we might imagine ourselves just to be lucky that she happened to be stabled with a man who understands that no champion thoroughbred has ever retired, according to the dismal cliché, with “nothing left to prove.” But of course that's the whole point. It wouldn't be a coincidence at all.
If it's there it will be Found…
It will be interesting to see if this merciless humiliation leaves any mark on Hartnell (GB) (Authorized {Ire}) in the Melbourne Cup. When a horse gets accustomed to dominating rivals, the way he had in his three previous starts, it must compound mental with physical agony to be ground eight lengths under a lady's heel in that way. So if connections were at all puzzled by Hartnell's failure at least to impose himself on the rest, then maybe they have a measure of the way Winx had made him gasp. On that same account I always had a soft spot for Excelebration (Ire) (Exceed And Excel {Aus}). A punchbag for Frankel on no fewer than five occasions, he retained the appetite to reserve his most impressive performance for his penultimate start in the Queen Elizabeth II S. – and then to run Wise Dan (Wiseman's Ferry) to a couple of lengths in the GI Breeders' Cup Mile only a fortnight later. That was typical, of course, of the way his trainer and owners have manfully sought to cope with the disruption caused by the insular scheduling of Qipco Champions' Day. Nor, in the context of the remarks concerning Winx above, is it any surprise that they are now thinking about a crack at the Breeders' Cup Classic for one of the outstanding females to have defined their own season. Remembering the travails of her sire in the same race, it is hard to believe that Found (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}) is terribly likely to discover in what is now so solid a turf sire-line any sudden aptitude for dirt. For one thing, however, it's a strategy that would enable two of the yard's other star fillies, Alice Springs (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}) and Minding (Ire) (Galileo {Ire}), a clear run at the Mile and the Filly & Mare Turf respectively. And, far more importantly, nobody will ever be able to accuse connections of leaving any stone unturned in establishing the limits of Found's capacity.
Fastnet Rock On A Roll…
As the splash made by Winx rippled across the racing world, there was a smaller but concentric impact for the Australian Turf in the success of Rivet (Ire) (Fastnet Rock {Aus}) in the final G1 of the British campaign. Another to have clicked through a Galileo mare, Rivet's Racing Post Trophy consolidates a growing portfolio of European success for his sire. In fact, Fastnet Rock (Aus) (Danehill) had three winners from three runners in Britain the previous day while Crimson Rock (Fastnet Rock {Aus}), his $1 million half-sister to Peeping Fawn (Danehill) and Thewayyouare (Kingmambo), made a winning debut for Ralph Beckett down at Newbury on the same afternoon. You knew that Rivet would run better than he had in the G1 Dubai Dewhurst S. only a fortnight previously simply from the way he has been campaigned by his trainer – one of the most dependable around, in terms of pitching his horses at the right level. William Haggas has treated Rivet like a very good prospect throughout, and you suspect that he will continue to cement together the colt's raw building blocks – as implicit in his buoyant action and fine looks – as they go along. Certainly nobody will treat this as too literal a compliment to the form of the Dewhurst, where Rivet resented early restraint and drifted right across the Dip.
If it meanwhile proved somewhat too unorthodox an experiment to step Sir Dancealot (Ire) (Sir Prancealot {Ire}) up to a mile against Rivet, given the way he had tanked through a sprint on his previous start, then David Elsworth's highly individual genius has certainly paid overall dividends with this €30,000 yearling. And Sir Dancealot could yet prove a plausible candidate for the G1 Commonwealth Cup next season, judging from the way he cruised forward before fading into sixth. Not that everyone will relish the prolific start made by his sire, one of the ever-growing band to be retired after just one season. Their number was increased this week by The Last Lion (Ire) (Choisir {Aus}), the remarkable Brocklesby-to-Middle Park slugger. Quite whether even a ten-race juvenile career warrants his promotion as a source of “durability” remains to be seen, but this week at any rate it is hard to argue with the further infusion, through his own sire, of Australian blood.
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