Horse racing: Legarto glamour star at Ellerslie

Legarto winning the Group 1 Australian Guineas. Photo / Bruno Cannatelli

The horse Ellerslie deserves for its comeback meeting on Sunday is ready to add the glamour touch.

The Auckland track returns to racing with a twilight meeting after 22 months away for the installation of the StrathAyr surface, with Sunday the day many in the industry have been craving.

The new surface should provide good and equal footing year round because of superior drainage, and with stakes increasing and the track receiving great feedback from jockeys, Sunday feels like a new dawn for New Zealand thoroughbred racing.

The meeting is very much a soft opening before the huge TAB Karaka Millions meeting on January 27, so will have interested summer onlookers and punters rather than the explosion of activity in two weeks.

But it still deserves serious horses on show and Auckland Thoroughbred Racing has attracted them.

The $100,000 Gingernuts Salver is the black type race and a step towards the NZ Derby at Ellerslie on March 2, while there is age group talent spread across the card as trainers use today’s meeting to familiarise horses with Ellerslie before the lucrative targets ahead.

But the star attraction will be Legarto, who shines brighter than race rival Sharp ‘N’ Smart, even though he is the reigning Horse of the Year.

While Imperatriz is New Zealand’s best horse, she hasn’t been trained here for months and may never race here again, with the Australian dollars too stratospheric to warrant an emotional homecoming run.

So that probably leaves Legarto as the best and most glamorous horse trained in New Zealand, as she produced some staggering wins here last season before winning the Australian Guineas last March.

She is using Sunday’s race as her kickoff point for a potential three-race domestic campaign in races totalling more than $2 million, with the lure of a $500,000 bonus, and co-trainer Ken Kelso says she is ready. “She’s had two trials and is working well, so we can’t get her much more ready without a race,” says Kelso, who trains in partnership with wife Bev.

“We’re happy with her but of course the race will bring her on and that could make her vulnerable to a couple of horses like Wild Night and Sacred Satono who are race fit.

“But I’m hoping a horse like Packing Rockstar being in the race means there is some tempo, which would help us.”

While Legarto opened odds-on with the TAB, today’s race could be a banana peel, with the small field and good track suggesting it could suit horses on the speed.

That won’t necessarily be a disaster for Legarto backers, as she has been jumping well and able to stay handy in recent trials, but whether her connections want to ride her handy fresh-up on Sunday is another poser for punters.

The best version of her coming from midfield off a solid pace should still win, but if the leaders start rolling home today, with the new ground always favouring those on the rails, then she may look less appealing.

The Gingernuts Salver has the look of a Derby trial without the biggest guns, many of whom will start trying 2000m-plus trips next month after races such as yesterday’s Levin Classic and the Karaka Millions.

But as befits a day of such significance, there are high-class horses laced right through today’s programme for which the rail will be out 7m to protect the inside ground for the Karaka Millions.

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.