Racing: It’s heavy going for the winter warriors

Sumi. Photo / Race Images

New Zealand punters have been given a timely reminder this week of what to expect for much of the winter.

The meetings at Riverton on Wednesday and the partially abandoned programme at Whanganui on Thursday were run on tracks so waterlogged the 1200m races were being won in times usually recorded for 1400m.

The most graphic example, the 2000m highweight at Whanganui on Thursday, was run more than 40 seconds slower than the national record for the distance, which equates to 700m.

It has been so wet the Matamata meeting scheduled for yesterday has been transferred to tomorrow.

Horse racing is usually about speed, class, jockeys, trainers, barrier draws and luck. When the tracks get really heavy it comes down almost exclusively to which horses handle the conditions, fused with a touch of race fitness.

To complicate matters even further, there are heavy tracks and then there are really heavy tracks.

Since New Zealand Thoroughbred Racing changed its track ratings system to be in line with Australia we now have heavy8 tracks, which two years ago would have been rated soft, up to heavy10.

Rotorua and New Plymouth today are rated heavy10s and that can mean fields strung out over 200m first-to-last, jockeys racing to the outside fence rather than the inside and plenty of riders coming back and offering the simple excuse, “it just didn’t handle the track”.

There are some guidelines to backing horses when the tracks get to the mega heavy range.

Trainers such as Kevin Myers and Allan Sharrock, who have Happy Star and Sumi in today’s features are Rotorua, are proven sources of winter warriors.

There are stallions whose stock seem to relish the heavy more than others, some are unfashionable but other well-known sires like Redwood, Sacred Falls and El Roca can throw wet weather horses to complement their summer stakes horses.

Winter’s worst tracks also give apprentice jockeys their chance to shine, not only because their weight claims are so valuable but in winter the racing is looser, the gaps bigger and the decisions don’t need to be made so quickly, so their inexperience is not as telling a factor.

On the subject of apprentices, one of the young stars of the season returns to Saturday racing today with Kelsey Hannan back after a long injury layoff.

There are a handful of Kiwis in action in Queensland where Doomben is rated a soft5, with Waitak in the Rough Habit Plate, The Racketeer in another three-year-old race and Nod Of The Head (R3) engaged for Lisa Latta, who has scratched Platinum Invador from the Chairman’s Handicap.