SWAN Hill Jockey Club staged a pick-up meeting Friday afternoon, but the only Swan Hill trainer who could pick up a win was Heath Chalmers – and in the first of the day.
From there on it was very slim pickings all around, with Austy Coffey, Noel Watson and Nathan Hobson only managing to sneak onto the podium with a third place each.
The Swan Hill meeting wasn’t a wet-weather transfer, it was an unscheduled meeting endorsed to compensate for previous meetings washed right out.
Racing Victoria reviewed its current racing program following the abandonment of several meetings in the past couple of weeks due to extreme rainfall and flooding across the state.
The decision was made to program a new race meeting to provide additional opportunities for horses impacted by those abandonments – so Swan Hill, which had its own most recent meeting transferred to Warracknabeal – got some payback.
Just not much paydirt.
But if Chalmers and his four-year-old mare Poppet were to be the only local winner for the day, they did it in emphatic style, racing away with the $27,000 Bet365 Top Tote Plus Maiden Plate over 1200m by six lengths – and widening.
Poppet, having its 14th career start, but only its fourth for the Swan Hill trainer, jumped beautifully despite backing up from a run at Mildura on Tuesday (where she finished just three-quarters of a length behind Austy Coffey’s Masina over 1300m) and from that point it was put down the glasses and get your winning tickets out.
And all that despite clearly over-racing early on, despite a few horses making a minor show of a challenge and despite the Soft 7 track looking even softer.
“She pulled up well from Mildura, and she’s in good order now and been racing well,” Chalmers agreed in the understatement of the day.
“We haven’t had her all that long, her owners are a couple of brothers in Bendigo and they have been really good to me so it was nice to get a win for them.
“I picked this run because on paper there was no pace, and we are going to fight her, so we thought we would just let her do her thing and she was fit and ready to go so we thought we would take advantage of that.”
It was a bold and aggressive ride by jockey Sairyn Fawke, the Queenslander who moved to South Australia six years ago for a jockey apprenticeship and who has recently been making regular appearances on Victorian tracks – including victory in the Manangatang Cup for Austy Coffey.
He was at the Tuesday meeting in Mildura and watched Poppet run and said she went really well.
“And today there wasn’t as much pace on and I thought she was a much better chance, so I thought we would take the bad luck out of the equation, and as it is her track here, I ran it like a trackwork gallop,” Fawke said.
“I was cruising coming around the corner and she was just too good for them – and she showed it.”
