first word Hugh Bowman returns to the stable yard after riding Winx during trackwork at Rosehill Gardens in Sydney ahead of her 27th consecutive success in the Group 1 Colgate Optic White Stakes (below)
All weekend action
The racing was pretty full on, and right around the world, writes Paul Haigh
E
very now and then in racing you get weekends in which too much happens. The middle weekend of September was an outstanding case in point. Better start at the top and move on downwards. If the order isn’t right, please forgive. Winx won another race. This isn’t really news. It might have been if she hadn’t already won her last 26, 20 of them Group 1s. But as things stand this was a case of “situation normal”. Perhaps in order to make things more interesting some of those who witnessed the Group 1 Colgate Optic White Stakes said they thought as the field turned for home that there seemed a chance she might not win. They based their judgement on the fact that Hugh Bowman had to make a polite request for more speed
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In the end Winx only won by over 4l, which rather suggests she was never actually “in trouble”
rather earlier than he normally does when she races: that and the fact that the horses in front of her were about the best of the rest in Australia. In the end Winx only won by over 4l, which rather suggests she was never actually “in trouble”. Last month this column picked up on the information that she takes shorter strides than other horses, but fairly obviously takes them quite a lot more often. This implies she might just find life a little more difficult if she ever found herself asked to race on genuinely soft ground of the sort that’s normally found outside her homeland. Since she’s never going to be asked to do any such thing there’s nothing much to say except that she continues to be phenomenal. No, something more than phenomenal. Bowman says he doesn’t expect there will ever be another like her, “not in my lifetime anyway”.
