Trainer championship a tightly contested duel to the line

Four into one won’t go. There’s only one South African national trainer championship on offer and any one of four of the country’s elite horse conditioners could grab the honour when the current racing season ends on 31 July.

Numbers tell the story.

The championship log standing on Monday – in terms of prize money accumulated over 11¾ months – was:

• Justin Snaith – R19,973,100
• Sean Tarry – R 18,564,763
• Brett Crawford – R17,737,563
• Mike de Kock – R16,567,719

The difference between first and fourth is just R3,405,381.

That might sound like a lot of money to us hoi polloi, but the word “just” is apt when we consider that total stakes on offer at the 13 race meetings still to be staged in the country is R19,230,913.

Cape Town washouts

There are several things to factor in when contemplating this sprint to the finish.

Significantly, a deluge of rain has washed out all racing in Cape Town so far in July, meaning that principally Cape-based Snaith and Crawford would probably have raked in a bit more loot with clearer weather.

Interestingly, though, while six meetings have been successfully staged on the Highveld, local trainers Tarry and De Kock have not made hay in the sunshine, with an odd win and a scattering of place cheques banked.

Of course, all four trainers are currently ensconced in the neutral territory of KwaZulu-Natal for the East Coast’s highly lucrative winter season – which reaches a climax on Sunday 28 July with Gold Cup Day and a total stakes pot of nearly R7.5 million.

Snaith and Tarry each have 14 runners carded for the 10-race denouement, while Crawford is down to saddle nine and De Kock four. We can expect battles royale, especially in Races 4 to 8 – which all have purses of R1 million or more.

De Kock is the rank outsider of the quartet, and his principal hope on the big day is in the R1.5 million Champions Cup with ever-improving four-year-old Dave The King, the elect of runaway champion jockey Richard Fourie – no small consideration given that he is associated with both the Snaith and Tarry yards.

Tarry has a very strong hand in both the Mercury Sprint (Race 6) with the phenomenal Lucky Lad and the Gold Cup (Race 7) with defending champ Future Pearl.

Additional fixtures

But Snaith and Crawford are not bringing knives to a gunfight. They also have the possibility of auxiliary earnings in their hometown, where four fixtures have been piled up over the next week – some added to compensate for washed-out ones – each of which boasts total prize money of more than R1 million.

From race cards so far published, we see that on Wednesday, at Kenilworth, Snaith has 19 runners and Crawford 13. The following day, at Durbanville, the count is 14 and 11 respectively.

Cellphone calculators are going to be working overtime in the coming days.