But before George heads to Suncorp tomorrow he will be at the Doomben races today to watch Dream Roca, the filly he part owns, contest the A$300,000 ($365,000) Spirit Of Boom Classic, a Group 2 race.
Dream Roca was bred in New Zealand, sold to Queensland trainer Liam Birchley at the Karaka yearling sales and returned home to win the $1 million Karaka Millions at Ellerslie in January, with George trackside.
The Warriors boss has a long association with racing, being a stipendiary steward (racing’s integrity officers), which brought him to New Zealand from Australia and he eventually ended up as chief executive of the Auckland Racing Club.
A successful reign there saw him get the Warriors job and he would be on anybody’s shortlist for the best sporting administrator in the country.
Horse racing remains a huge passion for George, as it is for Warriors coaches Andrew Webster and Stacey Jones, with a horse George and Jones co-owned together called Quintessa winning the first Group 1 race of the New Zealand season last September.
While victories like that and winning the Karaka Millions are hard enough to achieve, the hardest races for New Zealand owned, trained or bred horses to win in Australia are their glamour two-year-old races.
Australians specialise in trying to win those early dashes for cash and when you own a horse racing in elite juvenile races in Australia you are often competing against racing super powers.
So while she is trained in Queensland and a class filly, Dream Roca will need to be good to win today and earn a shot at some of the even richer 2-year-old races at the Queensland winter carnival.
She is drawn barrier 1 with talented local jockey Ben Thompson aboard, so Dream Roca is the $4.60 second favourite, meaning the bookies give George a $7.50 chance of pulling off the dream sporting double.
Ironically the only horse more favoured than Dream Roca today is Vantorix, who will be ridden by the world’s best jockey James McDonald, a Warriors fan.
There will be plenty of other Kiwi interest at Doomben, which is set to be run on a rain-affected track after a wet week in Brisbane.
Cambridge filly Solid Gold takes on the male 3-year-olds in the Rough Habit Plate and while she beat the boys at Ellerslie last start, she faces a wide barrier and some promising opposition, with co-trainer Roger James suggesting she will be ridden conservatively.
And the former Kiwi galloper Jimmysstar, still part-owned in New Zealand by breeder Sam Williams, is favourite for the A$1.5 million ($1.835m) Doomben 10,000, one of Queensland’s premier sprints.
Closer to home, Ellerslie hosts its last black type race of the season with the $100,000 Champagne Stakes, in which Excite looks clearly the one to beat after winning a stronger race at Te Rapa.
The meeting has great depth with Excite the only odds-on favourite, and while his stablemate December is $3.60 to win the open sprint, most favourites for the day are in the $4-$6 range.
Some of the better value comes in Bulgari (R6, No.3) at $6 while Cosmic Dream (R7, No.10) is a good filly who was huge last start and is a better chance than her $6.50 price suggests.
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.
