TWO Swan Hill trainers have horses nominated for this year’s $175,000 bet365 Swan Hill Cup – but neither are holding their breath about being there come Sunday.
Con Kelly has Spanish Snitzel on his cup dream list – the four-year-old gelding has had three wins and eight placings from its 27 starts and won almost $135,000 in stakes.
Beautifully bred by Australian sire Choisir, a dual-hemisphere winner who was the first Australian horse to take out the UK’s Group 2 King’s Stand Stakes, also winning the Golden Jubilee Stakes in the same year, and coming down the mighty Danehill bloodline, certainly makes the Snitzel look as though he belongs in the cup field.
But Kelly has also nominated his star for a BM70 on the Friday and if he earns a start there, he might be home and resting in his stable by the time cup Sunday comes around.
“I’m taking a bit of a shotgun approach to the carnival this year,” Kelly says.
“I have five horses entered across a few races so am hoping to give them all a go,” he says.
“The Swan Hill Cup just keeps getting bigger and better, but for regional trainers, prize money of this size also attracts a lot of competition from the big city stables. That always makes winning your hometown cup a little harder.
“And if those trainers are making the trip for the cup, or the Topaz on Friday, they tend to throw in a few others for the support races on the card, and they are invariably also very good horses – money certainly gets a big crowd at the starting barrier.”
The Snitzel has had seven weeks of freshening across two breaks and his most recent start – in a BM70 at Mildura – saw him beaten a short half head on a soft 5 track over 1400m.
Swan Hill’s other potential cup runner – Noel Watson’s Redjina – is also entered in other races and the trainer has indicated he might focus on a 2400m run on cup Sunday if he misses the cup cut – or even if he makes it.
Redjina has been dominating regional racing headlines recently after getting a run in the $500,000 Andrew Ramsden at Flemington where a win was a guaranteed start in the 2022 Melbourne Cup.
That’s a far cry from the $175,000 cup on his home track – this year’s Melbourne Cup winner takes home a hefty $4.4 million.
It was heady stuff for a second-hand $10,000 horse that battled on bush tracks before finally giving Watson his first win with him at Kerang in a humble BM58 on Boxing Day.
“I still cannot believe he got that run in the Ramsden,” Watson says. “A golden ticket to the biggest cup of them all and the field wasn’t even full when the starter left them go”.
“But that Kerang race did something because Redjina really took off from there,” he says.
“Took off” is an understatement from the voluble Watson – the five-year-old gelding took things to a stratospheric level for a hobby bush trainer who is really a harness racing man, football radio commentator, and real estate agent long before he was ever a horse trainer.
On March 18, for a lark, Watson entered Redjina in a $75,000 handicap over 2040m at Moonee Valley. It was a last fling, of sorts, before the footy season started and he would be busy for months with no Saturdays to spare.
Except the bloody horse won, sparking Watson to turn on one of the greatest celebration exhibitions by a winning trainer in the history of horse racing – and he got to bank a $41,000 winner’s cheque.
“He got through the Ramsden run okay, even though he clearly had the sting taken out of his legs from a very heavy track only a few days before – he would never have run that if I had known he was going to make the Ramsden.”
Watson also has Rio De Sombras set for a cup weekend run. A three-year-old maiden filly with nine starts under her belt for one second placing (which came many starts ago), he is targeting a 1600m run for her.
