‘Redemption day’ is coming to Greyville

It will be a day of redemption on 31 July. The traditional grand finale of the South African racing season, the Gold Cup fixture at Greyville in Durban, offers chances to a number of horses to right wrongs, gain revenge and set the record straight. Or not – they can’t all win!

The Champions Cup, in particular, will have all contestants striving mightily to heal the hurts of a momentous 2022 Durban July with a consolation win of note.

Only 13 horses are entered for the 1800m Grade 1 race, but every one of them is high class and has something to prove.

Top of the ante-post betting market at 2-1 is Jet Dark, trainer Justin Snaith’s mercurial colt who flew into second place at the end of the July but had no chance of catching rocket-powered winner Sparkling Water.

Jet Dark won this race as a three-year-old in 2021 and is a dual Queen’s Plate winner. A record like that puts him in a class of his own and his owner and trainer will probably reckon he hasn’t got the admiration and adulation from the chattering classes that he deserves.

Another Champions Cup would go a long way to fixing that.

Next on the betting boards is 7-2 shot Kommetdieding – a rare Cape Town Met and Durban July champion who many a pundit reckons would have done better than his fifth place in this month’s July if he’d had a different preparation. His human helpers will be dead keen to make those clever dicks eat their words.

Then there is Linebacker, an outstanding competitor who ran inexplicably poorly in the July. In a similar place are Al Muthana and Waterberry Lane.

Astrix did a lot better in the July than expected and the country’s leading trainer Paul Peter will surely give his much-improved gelding an outside chance at 16-1.

Then there are horses like Marina and Russian Rock, who were unlucky not to make the July final field and whose connections will be keen to embarrass that big-race selection panel.

The same applies to Nebraas, who is a clear favourite for the meeting’s headliner, the famed Gold Cup itself. Trainer Sean Tarry expressed his disappointment that Nebraas didn’t crack the nod and nothing would prove his point better than his charge doubling up on his 2021 Gold Cup triumph.

Captain’s Ransom, the mighty four-year-old filly that not a few people rate the best local thoroughbred in training, goes for her 12^th win in her 15^th outing – in another Grade 1 on the card, the 1200m Mercury Sprint.

Her redemption will be for a shock defeat in the Garden Province Stakes on July day. She never looked her imperious self on that occasion and might have been a touch “over the top” following heroics a few weeks earlier in the SA Fillies Sprint at Scottsville.

BETTING

Gold Cup

19-10 Nebraas

4-1 Aragosta

9-2 Black Thorn

8-1 Shangani

16-1 Shango, Salvator Mundi

18-1 Chollima

20-1 and upwards the others

Champions Cup

2-1 Jet Dark

7-2 Kommetdieding

5-1 Linebacker

7-1 Al Muthana

17-2 MK’s Pride

16-1 Astrix, Russian Rock, Waterberry Lane, Marina

20-1 and upwards the others

Mercury Sprint

33-10 Captain’s Ransom

7-1 Master Archie, Alesian Chief

15-2 Cosmic Highway

12-1 and upwards the others