“She is a freak and a champion, it is just great to be part of it,” says driver Jason Lee.
Keayang Zahara has won 28 of her 29 starts, the closest thing Australasian harness racing has had to a Winx, Black Caviar or dare we say it Autumn Glow so early in her career.
Of course, she will never be as famous as them.
Zahara swims in a shallower pool and she has picked a tough time to be a superstar on the harness racing scene, living in the era of Leap To Fame and his combatants.
Anybody who has seen Keayang Zahara loves her, with her sleek looks and majestic gait as she kicks her front legs cartoonishly far away from her body for maximum stride length.
But she is still harness racing’s secret queen.
You hear thoroughbred participants and fans rave about Leap To Fame when he does something extraordinary but Keayang Zahara makes the extraordinary look normal.
Before last night’s jog around Cambridge she equalled the Australian mile record after winning by 12m at Menangle.
But 75 minutes later Leap To Fame won the Miracle Mile in a relatively slow time and that was all anybody was talking about.
Keayang Zahara is owned, trained and driven by the Lee family in Victoria, genuine country people so nice they aren’t going to start a media war with anybody.
Making it worse is the horse who often gets closest to Keayang Zahara in her Victorian races is stablemate Jilliby Ballerini, who again finished second tonight.
Stablemates don’t make for great rivalries.
And of course Gus, who was a brave third coming from last tonight and had already dominated the Kiwis at New Zealand Cup week, is a talented trotter but a villain he is not.
Gus is adorable, also trained by lovely people and he is from Queensland, which has never produced a great trotter before.
Making Gus the villain in the Kaeyang Zahara story would be like hating the Jamaican bobsled team.
What Keayang Zahara needs to maximise her fame, and usefulness to the battling harness racing industry, is a true enemy.
A horse to pick on her, maybe beat her one time when she is a touch unlucky or even better just beat her fair and square.
A horse that fans and the uber parochial Victorian harness racing community can hate, an Apollo Creed to her Rocky.
It would be better if it was a Kiwi, especially now the New Zealand harness horses have been getting beaten up for the past three years.
And a male would be ideal, all that boy versus girl stuff. Two tribes, transtasman and all that.
The problem with finding Keayang Zahara’s villain is he or she is going to need to be very, very good.
Even great.
Maybe even one of the best trotters ever in this part of the world just to get into the conversation with Keayang Zahara.
Let’s hope he or she turns up.
Because the best thing that could happen to Australasian harness racing right now, as the sun starts to set on the careers of Leap To Fame and Swayzee, is a big, ugly, Kiwi trotter who can make every race fan in Australia cheer for Keayang Zahara.
Because she deserves to be adored.
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.
