Daily News 2000 (Group 1)
Tabgold Woolavington 2000 (Group 1)
DURBAN July favourite Green With Envy hardened from 10/3 to 5/2 despite managing only a decidedly unimpressive head victory in the Daily News 2000 at Greyville last Saturday.
The Cape Derby winner - by Gimmethegreenlight out of the David Wachman-trained Wexford winner Miss Coco (by Galileo) - started odds-on for this 10-furlong test but only scrambled home from 10/1 shot Flag Man.
“I had to take a check and he didn’t like that at all,” reported rider Craig Zackey, “and in the last 200 metres, he kept hanging in.”
However, Zackey made it clear that he has not lost faith in the horse so far as the big one is concerned, saying: “I am excited about the July. This horse is as tough as they get and he is sensational – you pop the question and it’s instantaneous.”
Dean Kannemeyer, who was winning the race for the third time, added: “He is on the right track for the July and he fought all the way to the line but I thought it was a rather odd-run race.”
It will be interesting to see what the handicappers make of it – the July weights do not come out for another 17 days – but the bookies wasted little time in singling out Flag Man, slashing him from 85/1 to 10/1 third favourite.
Meanwhile, Richard Fourie, fourth on Pure Predator, is on course to beat Anthony Delpech’s 334-winner seasonal record that has stood since the 1998/’99 campaign.
He started this week needing just 21 winners to put himself in the history books after having had 1,377 rides and covering almost as many airmiles as some pilots.
He landed last Saturday’s Tabgold Woolavington 2000 on the Mike de Kock-trained Silver Sanctuary (a Silvano mare out of an Antonius Pius mare) to make it three years on the trot for Gaynor Rupert and her Drakenstein Stud.
“I’ve been away in the States for the last week and I always say that I am a very lucky man because I have a proper crew in the pit-lane,” quipped Mike de Kock.
“But I wouldn’t be hell-bent on running this one in the July. She is also in the Garden Province on the same day.”
RACING at Fairview (near Port Elizabeth) takes place almost every Friday and jockey Sandile Khathi must have thought the stipes suspected something when he was made to submit samples four weeks in succession earlier this year.
On the second Friday, he resolved to do something about it. The specialists who test the samples could hardly believe it. Khathi had added water to the urine before handing it in, presumably in the hope that the cannabis he had been taking might not show up.
The National Horseracing Authority officials were singularly unimpressed and the unfortunate jockey was handed, not just a 14-day ban for the cannabis but also a year’s suspension for “tampering with samples or misleading officials.”
The good news is that 300 days of the year ban have been suspended for five years provided he commits no similar offence in the meantime.