Grail Seeker is the defending champion in the Proisir Plate but impossible to get a line on. Photo / Race Images
This is one of those good news, bad news stories.
First the good news. Racing returns to Ellerslie tomorrow with one of the best season launch meetings anybody can remember.
Big stakes are back, so is a good track and there is class across the card.
The icing on the cake: the first Group 1 of the season, the $400,000 Proisir Plate, is stacked with serious horses and a line-up of proper jockeys.
Now for the bad news.
Nobody seems to have a clue who is going to win it.
Speak to the people behind or on top of these equine rocket ships and they are not quite sure whether they are ready for blast-off.
Take Lance O’Sullivan, for example. He and Andrew Scott trained Grail Seeker to win this race at Hastings last season and they have Waitak, Checkmate and Tomodachi joining her tomorrow.
Great representation, no idea.
“We really don’t know,” O’Sullivan told the Herald.
“It is so hard to get a line on Grail Seeker because she had two quiet trials and she does so little at home.
“We know she can win because she did it last year but I’d be more confident if the race was at Hastings with maybe a bit more give in the track and left-handed.
“Tomodachi is a really good mare but her draw is a killer. She could run the fastest sectionals in the race and probably will, but she could also do that and finish only fifth or sixth.
“Checkmate is a good horse but he is stepping up a long way in class so I suppose Waitak might actually be the best of our four.
“He is working really well, has won at this level but then again, all last season he was running on and being unlucky.
“But if you made me go for one on top it would be Waitak.”
Nothing like an all-time racing great choosing a $23 chance ($26 boosted) as the best of his four chances to put the cat among the punting pigeons.
Let’s move on to Michael McNab, who rode five winners at Ruakākā on Wednesday and is leading the jockey’s premiership.
He rode Tuxedo to win fresh up last start and has also cruised around on La Crique as she has won two trials like a frisky 3-year-old rather than a 7-year-old perennial bridesmaid.
“Tuxedo is a really good horse but I think he still has a few things to learn. But he can win,” said McNab.
“I had never really trialled La Crique up before and she was awesome. I’d like to have drawn in a few spots further in but she can win. She is flying.”
La Crique is a smaller, nippier version of Legarto, who, if she were a human, would be playing in the forwards at the Women’s Rugby World Cup.
Both won serious races last year at 1400m, even though it is short of their best, and if they are in the right place at the top of the straight it will take a beast to stop them.
But – in this story there is always a but – since Ellerslie put in the StrathAyr track the two queens have started seven times between them for one win.
Quintessa is a good mare, won a Group 1 as a 3-year-old and the Cockram Stakes fresh up this time last year but she has barrier 15, while Sterling Express is in form but is he a Group 1 horse? I guess we will find out.
Which brings us to El Vencedor. The weight-for-age king of New Zealand racing who trialled like it at Ellerslie recently.
He finds himself the highest rated horse in the country, on a track he loves with a perfect draw. All this in a race he wasn’t going to even start a few weeks ago.
Of course he can win. He is the big EV.
But the big EV has only ever placed twice in six fresh-up runs to start a new campaign.
What does all this mean?
In reality, we have a start to the Group 1 season where any one of about 10 horses could win without surprising and it may come down to field position and whether there is any tempo in the middle stages around the home bend.
Put simply: back the one you like because you can make a case for and against any of them.
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.