The new horse racing season in the Eastern Cape starts with a bang on Friday, at the Fairview track in Greenbushes. Two high quality races will be part of the meeting, and the top stables will be at each other right from the start.
The R175 000 Memorial Mile will be the main event. It is a race which has been dominated by top trainer Alan Greeff in recent times. Greeff will be aiming at winning this race, the seventh of Friday’s eight races, for a fifth time in a row.
The other big race is the R150 000 Paddock Stakes, also over 1 600m, which is race six on the card. This is also the second leg of the East Cape Challenge for fillies and mares, but the winner of the first leg, Pineapplemintgreen, won’t be in action again. This means no horse will pick up the bonus for winning all three legs. This race has also been dominated by one stable in recent times. The Sharon Kotzen yard has won this race the last three times.
In what will be a tremendously busy first month at Fairview, there will be seven meetings, three on the turf and four on the poly surface, in August.
This past Friday was a top-class meeting where we witnessed some exciting close finishes.
The visiting horses have done very well in the recent big races at Fairview, and last Friday’s action was dominated by the mighty Cape Town stable of trainer Justin Snaith. Snaith and jockey Muzi Yeni combined with a brilliant performance, which saw them win four of the eight races, including the feature.
Makazole, named after Makazole Mapimpi and even faster than the Springbok flyer, won the big race, the R200 000 Champion Juvenile Cup for two-year-old horses. What a finish this was! Yeni finished best of all to beat another Cape Town visitor, Mauritius Kestrel, with the first local horse My Best Shot close up in third. Although the Snaith stable dominated, there was an eye-catching performance by a local horse in one of the other races that deserves a special mention.
The four-year-old gelding Gimme’s Laddie, trained by Gavin Smith, won a handicap over 1 200m in a new course record time. Gimme’s Laddie won easily under jockey Craig Zackey, smashing a record set by Vauclair more than a decade ago! He won in 66.15 seconds.
Vauclair’s time was 66.48 and was achieved while carrying 55kgs. Gimme’s Laddie had 61kgs on his back. Another Smith horse to produce a brilliant run on Sunday was the two-year-old filly Happy Holly. She finished third in top company in the R500 000 Debutante at Greyville in Durban at the last meeting of the South African Champions Season.
Fairview in August
2: Turf – Memorial Mile
6: Poly
9: Women’s Day
16: Turf
23: Poly
30: Turf
