Lisa Allpress
Heading into today's Waverley Races, local star Lisa Allpress is now an unbackable favourite to win the National Jockeys' Premiership, but a second title isn't the only milestone on her radar.
The TAB has her at $1.01 to land the title with a lead of 12 wins over arch-rival Matt Cameron, with less than five weeks of the season remaining. Allpress opened at $6.50 last August.
While Allpress' focus is on making the most of the remainder of the domestic season, she intends re-applying for a licence in Japan with a goal to ride in the Japan Cup in November. She rode seven winners during a three-month stint there last year.
The 41-year-old Whanganui mum of two is also poised to break her own personal record of wins in a season, currently sitting two short of her previous best season of 159 from the 2011-12 Premiership.
She is sponsoring today's 'Lisa Allpress Thanking all her Loyal Supporters Handicap' race on the Waverley card.
"I've had an amazing season so far and enjoyed great support from owners and trainers the length of the country," Allpress said.
"I go to race meetings and there's always someone there saying 'congratulations for your success, keep going, we're right behind you'. It's really humbling actually."
Allpress' 159 from four seasons ago ranks as the equal seventh best season total of New Zealand wins of any jockey and with more than a month of the current season remaining, she can climb her way further up the all-time ladder.
James McDonald holds the current season record with 207 wins, set in 2010-11, breaking the existing record of 197 set by Lisa Cropp in 2004-05.
Three years earlier Lance O'Sullivan had set the record of 193, easily the best of his 13 centuries of wins for a season in New Zealand.
Michael Walker holds the fourth and fifth spots with tallies of 182, a then New Zealand record set in 2000-01, and 173 from the 2007-08 season which was cruelly cut short in mid-May when he suffered a season-ending pig-hunting accident.
Allpress shares the next rung with O'Sullivan, whose third-best tally was 158. Others to have reached 150 wins in a season are Matt Cameron (156 and 155), Opie Bosson (152) and McDonald (151).
This season she has averaged 14 winners a month but has put her foot to the floor in the previous two weeks, winning 15 races in the space of 10 days, including a haul of five wins at Oamaru last Thursday.
Allpress and Cameron have both made a century of New Zealand wins in a season five times, well shy of O'Sullivan's record of 13. Chris Johnson and Opie Bosson have reached the century mark on five occasions as well.- NZ Racing Desk