People underdressed for the spring soaking hid under umbrellas, rubbish bins, chairs and each other, while others embraced their inner child and had hail-ball fights.
The race meeting was delayed for one race (40 minutes) and it felt odds-on racing would be cancelled.
But the hail stopped and those who hadn’t headed home did what Cantabrians do: got on with it, ordered another drink and tried to find the winner of the next race.
After stewards had conferred with jockeys, the meeting went on – but what had been a heavy 8 track but likely to improve had turned into a genuine heavy, with a cover of hail balls – track conditions never quite seen here before.
Some favourites, like Platinum Attack in the Stewards, were scratched and others who weren’t clearly didn’t handle the conditions.
Jockeys started to come wide looking for better conditions but the longer the meeting went on, the less it mattered as the whole track was soaked.
By Guineas time it was anybody’s guess what might unfold as the market went haywire, punters unsure which horses would handle the wet and the weirdness.
Ultimately it was Romanoff, a son of great wet-track stallion Belardo, who out-toughed the rest.
He was clearly the second string of the Gerard pair in the market, but Queiroz went where others fear to tread by angling towards the inside after sitting fourth during the early part of the race.
He then waited as long as he could before pushing the button – but just when it looked like he might have stolen the Guineas, his more favoured stablemate Affirmative Action closed and right on the line, dived.
It looked like he had won, jockey George Rooke celebrating – and he wasn’t alone.
But while Romanoff may have lost the Guineas a stride before the line, that isn’t where they pay the money, and the tough little fella got his nose back in front at exactly the right moment.
Punters, jockeys and Gerard waited before it was confirmed this was Romanoff’s Guineas – just – as he’d regained the edge over his stablemate.
“To be honest I was nervous when the rain came and didn’t know what to expect,” said Gerard, who trained Savaglee to a far easier Guineas win last year.
“Obviously both horses have gone great races and I am thrilled for their owners, and for Bruno.”
Queiroz rode 16 Group 1 winners in his native Brazil and has ended up in New Zealand after he moved to Singapore a year before racing there sadly closed down.
Like many on-track, Queiroz thought he had been beaten on the line, his face a picture of shocked joy when the judge announced Romanoff as the winner.
Queiroz thanked trainer Gerard, Romanoff and the horse’s owners.
He also thanked God. Which seems fair, because this may have been a Guineas win that fell from the heavens.
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.
