Meet Cape Town’s ‘young-gun’ couple

At Kenilworth on Saturday, Adam Marcus burst on to the big stage when he led in his first Grade 1 winner, Missisippi Burning, after she’d walloped her opposition in the Cape Fillies Guineas.

Just 35 minutes earlier, Marcus was standing in the same hallowed space with Vardy, a four-year-old gelding who’d just landed the young trainer his first Grade 2 victory – the Green Point Stakes.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine my first Grade 1 and Grade 2 coming one after the other like that,” said Marcus this week.

That was not all. Marcus’s girlfriend, Lucinda Woodruff, also saddled two winners on a race day the couple won’t forget. The latter delivered with Worlds You Oyster, a 50-1 upset in the curtain raiser, and Dharma, a 40-1 shock in the card’s third feature, the Grade 3 Summer Stayers Handicap.

Marcus and Woodruff – who have been dating for six years – occupy neighbouring stable yards at Milnerton. They each tend to their own horses, but there is obviously close companionship and mutual assistance.

“She makes great coffee, so I drop in there quite a lot,” jokes Marcus.

To racing folk, the surnames give away the family heritages.

Adam is the son of the great Basil Marcus, who blazed the trail for South African jockeys in Hong Kong by winning seven championships in that racing-mad city.

Lucinda is the daughter of Geoff Woodruff and has charge of the multiple champion trainer’s Cape Town satellite string.

“Lulu is showing us up!” was Woodruff senior’s gruff comment from his Randjesfontein base this week.

Adam Marcus, now 30, took out his trainer’s licence seven years ago, with a small cohort of moderate horses.

Father Basil was training successfully in Singapore when he decided to retire and return to South Africa. Adam, keen to start his own career, had to start from scratch back in Cape Town – albeit with his dad’s expert help in the yard. (Nowadays, Basil is enjoying his retirement and drops into the stables once a week to socialise and check on his own horses.)

After those seven years of hard toil, Adam Marcus believes he at last has the quality of thoroughbred stock to make it in a highly competitive racing arena.

“Getting beyond Grade 3 and Listed success is a massive leap and you can’t do it without the stock,” he says. “It’s been a lot of hard work, but I’m now getting support from leading owners and breeders. My current 35 horses are the best quality I’ve had thus far.”

Saturday’s heroes Vardy and Mississippi Burning are at the top of the pile – along with the good horse Twist Of Fate, a Durban July third-placer who has relocated from the departing Joey Ramsden’s yard.

Marcus describes Vardy as “very progressive”. “He always had ability, but was tall and lanky and took a while to fill out and mature fully. He’s twice the horse he was a year ago.”

After the way Vardy disposed of such vaunted opponents as two-time Durban July champ Do It Again and the estimable Rainbow Bridge in the Green Point, there was never any question the son of Var would be aimed at Cape Town’s biggest races, the Queen’s Plate and the Sun Met, in the coming weeks.

Thereafter, Vardy will take a short break before a likely sojourn in Durban for the winter season and, possibly, a crack at the July.

Mississippi Burning’s agenda is less fixed, but a shot at the Majorca Stakes is being mulled.

Twist Of Fate – “a little champion who has done nothing wrong and is very reliable at the top level” – is likely to be shadowing Vardy in coming months.

Asked when he and Lucinda might get hitched, Marcus chuckles: “If we can win a few more Grade 1s we might be able to afford it!”

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