La Dorada faces moment of reckoning in challenging Levin Classic

La Dorada was New Zealand's best juvenile last season but needs to find that form again tomorrow. Photo / Kenton Wright

Tomorrow is D-Day for La Dorada at Trentham.

Last season’s champion juvenile heads to the $400,000 Levin Classic with the ideal conditions to put her season back on track and announce herself as a contender for both the Karaka Millions and NZB Kiwi, races for which she was once favourite.

La Dorada finished last season not only winner of the Karaka Millions Two-Year-Old but also the Group 1 Sires’ Produce, run under the exact same conditions as tomorrow’s race, 1400m around Trentham.

Back then she destroyed her rivals in the style of a filly who looked certain to go on with the job, but she has failed to find her dazzle this season.

Her first-up task in the Group 1 Moir Stakes was a tough one so being unplaced there can be forgiven, but she was below her best at her next start and then returned home and only battled into fourth in a handy three-year-old race at Te Rapa three weeks ago.

Often when a star juvenile doesn’t return to their best at three, it can be because they haven’t developed, but trainer Mark Walker says La Dorada has enough physicality to still make her presence felt.

“She may not have got much bigger but she has thickened up and she looks like she should still be racing well,” he says.

“It can happen to some horses. We had a really good juvenile called Maroofity 20 years ago who never came back to his best at three and yet won the Thorndon Mile at four.

“But this filly is worth a lot of money as a Group 1-winning juvenile who is well bred so she will need to start stepping back up to her best form, otherwise she might be worth more as a broodmare.

“We are not going down that path yet though and we think she can turn it around, but if she is going to be a factor in those good races coming up, I think she needs to do something on Saturday.”


So will the La Dorada of last season turn up in the Levin Classic?

“I honestly don’t know, I am sitting on the fence,” says Walker.

The classic is deep but the set weight conditions suit Romanoff, as he is already a Group 1 winner of the NZ 2000 Guineas yet carries the same weight as other male gallopers just out of maidens.

Earlier at Trentham, the Walker/Bergerson stable take unbeaten juvenile Out Of The Blue to the Wellesley Stakes as he starts to eye the Karaka Million in three weeks.

His two wins both came in small fields at Riccarton in the spring so it is hard to work out how good he is, but he gets a vote of confidence from Walker.

“He is out of a good mare we used to train and he has that Riccarton experience, which often helps horses going to the same dogleg-type straight at Trentham so we think he will go well.”

The best-backed stable horse on Saturday might actually be at Te Aroha when Pilates (R4, No 9) makes her long-awaited debut.

“She has a real touch of class about her and we think she will be winning on Saturday and could even turn up in some of those better three-year-old races.”

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.