Justin Snaith will add Saturday’s easy Kenilworth winner Gift Of Rain to his Final Fling line-up on Saturday week as he bids to win Cape Town’s penultimate feature of the season for the fourth successive year.
He said: “I promised Gaynor Rupert black type with this horse even before the mare came to South Africa so I am now under a bit of pressure. She is a Galileo and she is a different horse in the soft but just about the only features left for her are the Final Fling and the Jockey Club Stakes (August 26) at Fairview, but if I send her for that and it rains they will switch to the race to the Polytrack.
“They did that when I ran her in it last year. The track was far too firm for her and it has taken me this long to get her back to where I want her.”
Snaith and Richard Fourie made it a memorable return from Texas for Jack Mitchell by following up in the 1800m handicap with Prince Of Wales but the most remarkable story of the day came two races earlier when Jaswick Jordaan added the latest chapter in his contribution to the wonders of modern medicine by riding his first Cape Town winner since his return to the fray.
The tall 23-year-old said: “I was off for three years. The problem started when I suddenly found I couldn’t function that well, probably the result of a fall, and I was in hospital for a year. I spent a further 12 months recovering and then almost another year getting my weight down from 74kg to 59kg.
“I resumed in February/March and this is my sixth winner since. I joined Glen Kotzen a month ago and hopefully I have cracked the ice by winning on Treize for him.”
Prudence Prevails started favourite for the race and contributed to a painful day for punters – all eight favourites were beaten – by unshipping Corne Orffer as she came out of the pens.
But the biggest shock came in the last when Maximum Flo scored at 75-1 under Francois Herholdt who had already won the first on the Mike Robinson-trained Fire In The Belly. Brett Crawford, though, was left scratching his head over runner-up Rock On Geordies.
He said: “If you saw the way he works you’d have thought he would have been out of the maidens a long time ago. He is a frustrating horse.”
Greg Ennion gave up the beliefs of a lifetime with Sign Your Name and was rewarded with victory in the juvenile fillies.
He said: “I have a hard and fast rule that I don’t put blinkers on two-year-olds but Aldo Domeyer, who rode her last time, told me that If I did this filly would win. I rang Robert Khathi on Friday night and said I wanted him to ride her up the course with them on the following morning. He thought I was mad.”
There wasn’t much room when Khathi made his move 300m out but the filly put her head down and barged aside her rivals like Bryan Habana going for a try against the All-Blacks. Domeyer, only third on De Ragatas, is just one short of his first century after taking the mile maiden on Gyre to boost Adam Marcus who has spent the last week in bed with ‘flu and bronchitis.
Four jockeys also cried off sick and this, coupled with Bernard Fayd’Herbe plying his trade in Mauritius with a treble, led to scratchings in the last.
Michael Clower
