DAVE The King sprang a 10/1 surprise in the Hollywoodbets Gold Challenge at Greyville last Saturday but his convincing performance caused barely a ripple in the Durban July ante-post market. Maybe it should have done.

The Global View four-year-old (out of a Jet Master mare) seemed to have found something extra and Mike de Kock revealed a reason for the improvement.

True, his nearest pursuers were gaining on him in the closing stages but he had last year’s July runner-up See It Again two and a half lengths back third - and rider Muzi Yeni was impressed.

Very classy

“He is a very classy animal. I was told that the key was to get him out of the pens as cleanly as possible and let the race unfold around me,” reported the jockey.

“I had ridden him a bit of work at home but never in a race. I knew he could be very aggressive even going down to the start. Once I got him into a good rhythm, though, they went quite quick up front and played into his hands.

“Going through the 700 metre mark I had to take it up – I couldn’t hold him back any more – and in the final 100 metres it was up to him to win the race. He showed a lot of courage in doing so.”

De Kock, who first won this Group 1 with Record Edge in 1995, added: “It took me a long time to convince the partners to geld him but since then he has been a different horse.”

RICHARD Fourie was unplaced on the previous week’s impressive sprint winner Lucky Lad, but in the Group 2 East Coast Radio Tibouchina Stakes he finally lowered Anthony Delpech’s 1998/’99 record of 334 winners in a season – and appropriately Delpech was on course to congratulate him.

Fourie,38, had no family connection with racing – his father was a diamond cutter in Johannesburg – and he became a jockey because he was small. He was apprenticed to Basil Marcus in Cape Town and recalled: “Basil was a hard but straightforward person and I learned things from him in one year that you couldn’t learn in ten years such as the way to look at a race, how to read a race, how to know your opponents – jockeys not just horses, and how to communicate with people in the racing game.”

Fourie will be bidding for his fourth July win and he has been snapped up by Justin Snaith for recent Group 2 winner Future Swing. Snaith also trained Fourie’s previous July winners: Legislate (2014), Do It Again (2019) and Belgarion the following year.

Blood-testing to increase next season in South Africa

THE National Horseracing Authority is concerned about the apparent advantage to be gained by increasing blood alkalinity and next season it intends testing all runners.

In the three months to June 6th, 1,351 analyses were performed on 1,242 horses. During this period 20 horses were compulsorily scratched as their TCO2 levels were over the limit.