Orchestral has already won $2.7 million in stakes but will race on next season. Photo / Kenton Wright
One of the sweethearts of New Zealand racing is now confirmed to race on next season – and she could potentially have a forgotten Melbourne Cup prospect for company.
Orchestral may have had a rollercoaster season but co-trainer Roger James has told the Herald the four-year-old mare will definitely return to the racetrack and there is no talk of her being retired to stud.
While Orchestral is undoubtedly one of our elite race mares, it would have been easy for owners to consider retirement as she has little left to prove on the track.
She is not only a NZ Derby winner but she also won last year’s Karaka Millions Three-Year-Old and this season’s Elsdon Park Aotearoa Classic, the $1 million four-year-old race on Karaka Millions night.
Even more importantly, she has an Australian Group 1 win in the Vinery Stakes to her credit, those victories seen as the Holy Grail for New Zealand-trained mares these days.
Add to that the fact Orchestral’s yearling sister was sold for a New Zealand record $2.4 million at the Karaka sales in January and Orchestral is almost too valuable to continue racing, especially after a season of wild form swings.
But James, who trains the daughter of Savabeel with Robert Wellwood, says there has been no retirement talk, even as a plan B.
“She is going to remain a racehorse until she shows us she doesn’t want to be,” he told the Herald.
“Her owners love racing her so that is the plan. Ideally we would like to bring her up and all going well head to Melbourne in the spring.
“Australia is the first aim because usually the tracks are better there than here in the spring but if she didn’t come up exactly how we wanted, that could be revisited.
“But they want to race on and we are confident she will come back a better mare next season.”
James says the four-year-old season can be very taxing on mares just out of three-year-old ranks and in Orchestral’s case, that was made even more difficult by her ongoing hormonal problems.
“They are obviously an issue and we just need to learn how to manage those better,” says James.
“But those aside, I think when you look back on her beaten runs this season, she often had an excuse.”
Like most of the elite New Zealand gallopers eyeing up a potential spring campaign in Australia, Orchestral could now have the option of at least one start in New Zealand, with the first Group 1 of next season, the Tarzino Trophy, almost certainly moving to Ellerslie in September.
That means less travel than if the Tarzino was held at its traditional home of Hastings, which is likely to be under renovation this spring, but also the better surface all but guaranteed by Ellerslie’s StrathAyr track.
That could make the Tarzino a perfect launchpad for Australian raids later in the spring.
The forgotten horse of the James/Wellwood stable is already in Melbourne but will be travelling the other way across the Tasman, with Mark Twain set to return to New Zealand to rejoin the Cambridge stable.
Mark Twain gained automatic entry into last year’s Melbourne Cup when winning the Roy Higgins at Flemington in March 2024 and was being set for the iconic race when he suffered a tendon strain last August.
He has remained in Victoria since to be rehabbed but will return home in a month for a long build-up, hopefully ending in a new racetrack campaign.
Mark Twain, also a NZ Derby and Auckland Cup placegetter, hasn’t raced since winning that Roy Higgins, and if James and Wellwood are able to get him back to his best, his most realistic targets would be in Australia as the rising six-year-old would be weighted out of our biggest staying 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.