“I will be watching the weather,” Cooksley told the Herald.
“The intention is to start but it will all depend on what sort of track we get.
“It has been a Heavy 10 all week and if there was rain on Friday or overnight and it looked like the track was going to be a real winter heavy, then I think I’d scratch him.”
The good news for Cooksley and training partner Bruce Wallace, as well as punters wanting clarity around the Foxbridge, is it is forecast to be fine in Hamilton up until race day (at time of publishing).
While it almost certainly won’t get warm enough to bring Te Rapa back into the soft 5-7 range, a Heavy 8 and improving is a vastly different surface to a Heavy 10 with rain the night before, or worse on race day.
Sacred Satono has won on a Heavy 8 nearly two years ago but failed when heavily backed on a Heavy 9 in this race last year, just two weeks after trialing well so a preparation that mirrors this one.
“He might have handled the heavy when he was a younger horse but I don’t think he likes it now, maybe he is getting more cunning as he is getting older,” Cooksley opined.
“So we will see how the track comes up and if it is too wet then I will pull him out, give him a gallop somewhere and he can go to the Proisir Plate.”
But by that logic if Cooksley, who was an outstanding jockey who knows how to read a track, chooses to start Sacred Satono then he is still the horse to beat, albeit the drier the better.
He does have the potential advantage of barrier 1 in a field that lacks many genuine speed horses, so the 6-year-old should be fast enough to stay handy and therefore not have his line dictated and be forced to race on inferior ground in the home straight.
The Wallace/Cooksley stable also have former Hong Kong veteran Meaningful Star entered in tomorrow’s Group 2 race and he too would more than likely appreciate the Te Rapa track being firmer.
Meaningful Star won two similar races to this at Ellerslie late last spring but they were on slow and good tracks and being a 9-year-old, it is hard to imagine him relishing a heavy track.
While Sacred Satono would be the horse to beat on sheer class if they are skipping over the Te Rapa turf rather than ploughing through it, there are plenty of proven heavy-track performers who will handle whatever is thrown at them tomorrow, headlined by Twain then Spencer, Joshua Brown, Sterling Express and Midnight Scandal.
But the untapped Doctor Askar is not as proven on a testing surface, so the Easter winner is another whose price, and chances, could vary enormously depending on how the track looks mid-afternoon tomorrow.
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.
