Met winners and losers as One World keeps spinning

In his Sun Met victory interview on Saturday, trainer Vaughan Marshall intimated that newly crowned champion One World might not run again and would retire to stud at his birthplace Klawervlei. Reviews of the race immediately turned to his prospects in the breeding shed.

However, the latest news is that the lion-hearted colt will probably stay in training and is likely to travel to KwaZulu-Natal for the winter season.

Racing fans are big winners here: who isn’t relishing an epic replay of the thrilling Met finish in the Durban July, involving One World and Rainbow Bridge, who was so brave in narrow defeat at Kenilworth under visiting ace jockey Ryan Moore?

The bookmakers didn’t take chances, ignored assumptions that One World’s running was done and slashed his long ante-post odds to 10-1 third favouritism for a Greyville showdown. (Rainbow Bridge is 11-2 favourite, with Met disappointments Vardy at 15-2 and Do It Again also at 10-1.)

On a day crammed with happy winners, One World spun above them all in glory.

In retrospect, pundits might have taken him a lot more seriously. The horse has been phenomenally consistent in the highest company over a long period. This was his 10^th win from 14 starts, with three seconds and a third counting for his “failures”. Factors weighing against him in the punditry were a quartet of very charismatic rivals and a No 13 starting gate. He could be backed at 15-1 at the off.

It was another of the day’s big winners who helped One World overcome those odds. Journeyman jockey MJ Byleveld played his winning gambit the second the starting bell clanged, kicking his mount into clean air and claiming a spot up front on the running rail.

Well-fancied Hawwaam, Vardy and Do It Again were slower to get rolling and had to tuck in near the rear. The latter two appeared to be hampered by Hawwaam at various stages of the race. The result was that all three ended up losers on the day – though Hawwaam galloped on steadily in the closing stages to claim third prize.

Mike de Kock’s much-lauded son of Silvano is heading abroad so won’t be up for the Durban duel, but Do It Again will surely be trying for an unprecedented treble and Vardy’s jockey Craig Zackey has already announced: “We’ll get them there!”

The mighty De Kock stable must go down as a Met day loser with their other heavily favoured runner, Grade 1 Majorca Stakes favourite Queen Supreme, performing dismally.

De Kock’s Highveld neighbour Sean Tarry would also have left Kenilworth disappointed, with his consolation being a runner-up cheque for Celtic Sea in the Grade 1 Majorca Stakes.

Former champion trainer Tarry is never down for long, though, and he’ll already be fully focussed on this week’s big Guineas meeting at Turffontein, where he holds a very strong hand in both Grade 2 classics.

Majorca-winning trainer Candice Bass-Robinson was another significant 2020 Met day winner, snaring that venerable race with Clouds Unfold (5-1) AND the third Grade 1 contest on the card, the Cape Flying Championship, with 25-1 shot Russet Air.

Both those horses were piloted home by Aldo Domeyer, who ended the day as the jockey victor ludorum with three victories. One of those was Navida in one of the two R5-million sales races on the programme – a special element being that his step-mother Ashley Fortune saddled up for the 1200m dash and his old man, irrepressible former champion jockey Andrew Fortune, did the celebrating in extremis.

The other “mega-bucks” contest, the 1600m heat, was won by Brett- Crawford-trained Count Jack. The Big Five Syndicate – a bunch of seven Irish and US racing fans – might be less-than-impressed with the pathetic rand exchange rate when they collect their R2.5-million prize, but they are clearly upbeat about racing in South Africa.

In an interview in the Thoroughbred Daily News, the US racing paper, syndicate nominee Mick Flanagan enthused: “I think the cost to reward ratio racing a horse is actually very good there [in South Africa]. The landscape is obviously changing with a couple guys no longer involved and different things happening politically, but it’s a good, fun place, and who doesn’t love winning races in Cape Town in the month of January? It provides a great platform for people to get into horses and enjoy it. I can’t see us not doing it again. It’s been a pretty sweet experience. It’s just a bloody great day.”

Those words, in one of the world’s most prestigious journals, ensured yet another big winner on Met day: Cape Town’s racing scene.

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