Horse racing: Clash of unbeaten fillies highlight of superstar Matamata meeting

Te Encuentro (yellow, second from right) was dazzling winning on debut at Ellerslie. Photo / Kenton Wright

Trainer Lance O’Sullivan would like Te Encuentro to keep the surprises coming in the $225,000 Matamata Breeders Stakes tomorrow.

Although he says if the daughter of champion stallion Frankel can win the Group 2 race on her home track, it won’t come as quite the shock her progress so far has.

O’Sullivan and Andrew Scott train Te Encuentro, which is Spanish for I Find You, and the filly made a huge impression winning her debut at Ellerslie on Boxing Day, much to their delight.

“She is very casual in her track work and when we took her to her only trial [on December 9], we weren’t sure what to expect,” O’Sullivan said.

“She won that, which was a nice surprise, but we still didn’t know how she would go first time to the races.

“She then won that really well, which was also a bit of a surprise.

“I think that showed the improvement they can make from a trial to racing and they can often take even more improvement from their first race start into their second.

“We know she is a good filly now so there is no reason she can’t win again, even though if you were a betting man, you’d give the favourite a better chance.”

O’Sullivan is referencing fellow Matamata filly Lara Antipova, who has opened a hot favourite for the Breeders Stakes and looks every inch a jump-and-run filly after two huge wins in as many starts.

She may need that early speed to try to gain some tactical advantage over Te Encuentro and with Lara Antipova looking the more advanced of the pair, Te Encuentro is going to need to be something special to beat her.

O’Sullivan would love to win tomorrow’s Lisa Chittick Champagne Stakes, named in honour of his late sister, with either Lux Libertas or Smart Love.

The stable pulled off a great training performance to win the Manawatū Challenge Stakes fresh-up with Lux Libertas in December and O’Sullivan says she is the more proven of the two.

“She can obviously win but this race suits Smart Love and gives her a chance to get some black type.”

The race has enormous depth though, with former New Zealand 1000 Guineas winner Captured By Love, Mary Shan and Ardalio all high-class mares, while 3-year-old filly Belle Cheval is the favourite as she counts down to the NZB Kiwi on March 7.

The horse who finished third in last year’s inaugural NZB Kiwi, Checkmate, steps up to 2000m in tomorrow’s $100,000 Kamai Stakes, a distance he has always looked set to excel over, being a son of two-time Derby winner and Caulfield Cup hero Mongolian Khan.

“We have only tried him once over 2000m and that was in the Rosehill Guineas last year when he was at the end of his campaign,” O’Sullivan said.

“We are sure he will handle it but this race has actually come up pretty strong.”


The other two highlights of Matamata’s meeting of the season are the $150,000 Fairview Slipper for the 2-year-old boys and the $350,000 Comag Wairere Falls Classic.

The latter is restricted to horses whose trainers didn’t finish in the top 10 on the trainer’s stakes premiership last season and has brought together a fascinating bunch of sprinters and milers from around the North Island meeting at the relatively neutral 1500m distance.

Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.