Chief Stipe

Right so we now know who won past Telegraph's and attended them... But who wins today and who will be there?

Saturday's Gold Coast meeting to launch the Magic Millions Carnival has been moved to the Sunshine Coast. MORE TO COME ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ The start to the rich Magic Millions carnival hangs in the balance, with a high powered meeting taking place to determine the future of Saturday's meeting after a section of the track was poisoned overnight. It can be revealed racing officials are currently meeting on the Gold Coast after two senior Queensland jockeys galloped horses on the course proper on Friday afternoon. In a text sent out to their members, the Queensland Jockeys Association said they "weren't 100% happy" with the damaged section of the track at the 500m mark. "At this stage all parties are meeting currently and will make a decision on whether the meeting proceeds at the Gold Coast," the message reads.

Australian Bloodstock's Class purchase | RACING.COM www.racing.com This week’s Group 2 Sir Patrick Hogan Stakes (2000m) winner Real Class has been sold across the Tasman to Australian Bloodstock, but the promising filly may remain with her Byerley Park trainer Jenna Mahoney for a $1 million G1 Al Basti Equiworld Dubai New Zealand Oaks (2400m) campaign. Real Class has made a big impression in a career that spans only four starts dating back to early November. She finished eighth on debut at Pukekohe before scoring a stylish come-from-behind win in a 1600m maiden at Te Aroha on December 8. The Vadamos filly went on to be a breakout star of the Christmas Carnival at Ellerslie, flashing home from last to finish third in the G2 Eight Carat Classic (1600m) before backing up for a dominant Sir Patrick Hogan victory on New Year’s Day. Real Class by name and real class by nature, as the Vadamos filly wins the Sir Patrick Hogan Stakes @Ellerslie_Races. (Race 7) Ridden by Rory Hutchings and trained by Jenna Mahoney @ByerleyParkNZ. A race named in honour of one of the true greats of our industry. #NZRacing pic.twitter.com/ypACqbvXp4 — Trackside NZ (@TracksideNZ) January 1, 2025 Those performances caught the attention of Australian Bloodstock, and the syndication powerhouse has now secured the three-year-old in a deal brokered by bloodstock agent Melissa Robinson. “This filly has actually been on my radar since her maiden win,” Australian Bloodstock director Luke Murrell said. “We might have been able to pay a bit less to buy her if we’d managed to do a deal after that race. “But she went on to run well on Boxing Day, possibly against the pattern of the day, and then she won impressively when she stepped up to 2000m on New Year’s Day. They usually get run down when they have to take off that far from home, but she did a very good job to keep finding and win the race quite comfortably in the end. “She appealed to us as one of the better fillies over in New Zealand this year, and she has a bit of size and quality in her physique as well, which always helps with a staying type of three-year-old. “Melissa Robinson helps us with all the horses we purchase from New Zealand. We’ve used her for a few years now and had a bit of success together, and hopefully this filly will be more of the same. We’re only halfway there, but she’s got that black type now and looks like she’s got something to offer.” The New Zealand Oaks will be run at Trentham on March 22, with its stake doubling this season from $500,000 to $1 million. That significant increase could be a deciding factor in how long Real Class remains on New Zealand soil. “She’ll come across to Chris Waller’s stable in time, but we’ll just need to work out a plan around what our next step is going to be,” Murrell said. “We could bring her across to Australia early, or she could stay in New Zealand for a campaign centred around an Oaks. “At this stage, we might be leaning towards staying. The trainer’s done a great job with this filly so far. She paraded beautifully on New Year’s Day and performed accordingly. “With the higher stake that the New Zealand Oaks has now, it’s probably a bit more enticing for us to stay than it would have been previously.” The TAB currently rates Real Class a $10 chance for the New Zealand Oaks. She shares second favouritism with the G3 Eulogy Stakes (1600m) winner Leica Lucy, while the Andrew Forsman-trained Hinekaha holds $8 favouritism. – LOVERACING.NZ News Desk

Gold Coast track drama ahead of 2025 Magic Millions www.racenet.com.au Officials are scrambling to find out what has killed off a section of the new Gold Coast track just a day out from the start of the lucrative Magic Millions carnival. Photos reveal a large section of the track at the 500m mark has been damaged by chemicals, with officials taking samples for urgent testing to determine the substance. While it is expected the track will be safe to race on tomorrow, officials are not ruling out foul play by anti-racing campaigners. • PUNT LIKE A PRO: Become a Racenet iQ member and get expert tips – with fully transparent return on investment statistics – from Racenet's team of professional punters at our Pro Tips section. SUBSCRIBE NOW! As a result, the Gold Coast Turf Club will employ full-time security to guard the surface in the lead up to Magic Millions day on January 11. The affected area is about 25m x 10m in size and is on the home turn at the Gold Coast. Racing Queensland chief executive Jason Scott confirmed horses would gallop over the area on Friday afternoon, but said the surface was expected to be safe for racing tomorrow. The Gold Coast track had partly recovered by Friday afternoon. Picture: Supplied • EXPERT TIPS: Graeme Carey's race-by-race tips, analysis and quaddie picks for the Gold Coast on Saturday "While the race meeting is safe, Racing Queensland and the Gold Coast Turf Club are concerned about what has happened," Scott said. "We will continue to investigate, including sending samples to the laboratory to see what caused it." The $3m Sunlight slot race and $500,000 Wave to be run at the Gold Coast this Saturday. The mishap is the latest drama for the track, which was put out of action in March for around nine months. In 2023, a "rogue sprinkler" was to blame for the Magic Millions meeting being washed out after 14mm of rainfall.

Bramlage: Racing And Training 2-Year-Olds Reduces Their Risk Of Injury – Here's Why - Paulick Report paulickreport.com Before most horse racing jurisdictions shut down across the country and threw the economic balance of the sport into question, the industry's biggest problem was its need to reduce racing and training fatalities. Veterinarians and scientists are still learning about the causes of catastrophic injuries and, so far, it seems there may be a number of risk factors at play in any given injury. One theory that many people have offered over the years is that the practice of allowing horses to race at two years old is either the direct cause of early breakdowns or predisposes horses to serious injury later. Many such hypotheses equate training and racing a 2-year-old with putting an elementary school-aged child into the Olympics. For more than two decades, the sport has heard calls to put an end to 2-year-old racing. Those calls have been renewed recently, as some fans have seen the racing shutdown as a good time to reevaluate and modify its structure and improve equine welfare. The problem, according to Dr. Larry Bramlage, top orthopedic surgeon and Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital, is the halt of 2-year-old racing and training wouldn’t be a net gain for welfare or fatality rates – it might actually be a loss. Understanding why requires a deep dive into the process of bone development and skeletal growth. Firstly, Bramlage said, horses grow much, much faster than humans do. One study in the 1970s showed light horse breeds reach 84 percent of their mature height by the time they are six months old, and 94 percent of their mature height at 12 months – about 3 percent of the way into their life expectancy. This may be because they evolved as prey animals and, like other spindly-legged baby prey animals in the wild, needed to reach maximum height and stride length as quickly as possible to better enable escape from a predator. Humans, by contrast, get close to mature height between the ages of 16 and 18 – about 23 percent of the way into their life expectancy. Long bones, the type of bone found in horses’ legs, grow and change in a few different ways. One way is by lengthening at the site of growth plates, which are situated at either end of the bone. You may have seen charts showing the timeframes for growth plate “closure” – meaning the age at which those growth plates stop actively adding new cells to extend the bone’s length. Growth plates close from the ground up, so ankle joints close before knees, etc. Bramlage said the growth plates in the lower legs (knees and below) are closed at about two years old. “They have a few growth plates like the withers that last for ten years, but those are not really of much practical significance when we’re talking about injuries,” he said. Bones also undergo modeling, meaning they change in width and shape thanks to the work of cells that break down and build up bone. Modeling is directed by genetics. When an animal is young, most of the bone’s cellular resources are directed at growth, but the cells focused on the modeling processes become obsolete as the animal reaches sexual maturity. For horses, sexual maturity happens anywhere from nine months to 15 months of age. The whole bone formation process with its cells and blood supply are designed to atrophy away once growth ceases. For a horse in need of extra skeletal strength, like a racehorse, the modeling process of growth changes to the remodeling process of response to exercise. The remodeling process for an individual horse will be better if more of that blood supply and cell population makes the transition from modeling to remodeling. “The support system for growth in the horse is tremendous,” Bramlage said. “The support system for bone growth is blood supply and cell populations. You have to have the osteoblasts, the cells that form bone, and you have to have the blood supply to support them. “If you don’t train an adolescent horse, you let those populations and that blood supply atrophy; when you start training you have to recreate that again. And a horse can do that, but it’s a much longer process to recreate that system than if you take advantage of the fact that it’s already there, and it has already finished its first job.” Modeling brings a bone to its genetically mature size and shape, but it doesn’t necessarily make it dense enough or strong enough to withstand athletic activity. For a bone to become stronger and denser, it needs to undergo remodeling. Remodeling happens in two ways: when the bone suffers micro injuries from the stress of training and then repairs itself to become stronger; and when the bone senses its size and shape are insufficient to handle the exercise load it is experiencing and remodels its shape. In the first instance, cells called osteoclasts remove damaged existing bone and osteoblasts replace it with new bone; in the second instance, the osteoblasts add bone in specific locations to improve the bone’s shape based on the exercise it is experiencing. “The bone changes in relation to the load that it has seen,” Bramlage said. “You have to produce bone that’s hard enough to withstand the load it is seeing and bone with the best geometric shape to withstand the loading. The horse’s cannon bone is the prime example of where those processes are both underway during training. Overloading and over-repair is 'training' in all species.” So what does all that mean for 2-year-old racehorses? Bramlage said it means that turning a horse out until its third birthday and then beginning race training will adapt the skeleton to turnout for a year, but not to training or racing. The bone modeling system will largely atrophy. The horse is then introduced to training and will have to recreate the vascular supply and cell population devoted to remodeling. By contrast, the horse who trained at two only had to repurpose the vasculature and cells already present for growth. This can be complicated by the fact that the heart and lungs, which are oft-used indicators of a horse’s fitness, don’t respond to training exactly the same way as bone. Horses have such relatively large heart and lungs that they respond faster than the skeleton to training, especially when a previously sedentary horse begins training. Bramlage believes the horse who went through a year of turnout and began training at three is at greater risk of skeletal injury down the road because its skeleton may be less able to keep up the pace. Thanks to heart and lung conditioning, the rested horse may appear to be getting fit just as quickly (or even moreso) than his stablemate who trained at two, which could fool a trainer into increasing his workload too quickly for the skeleton. The data bears this out. Year after year, the Equine Injury Database has shown that 2-year-old runners had a significantly lower fatality rate than 3- and 4-year-olds. Preliminary data released earlier this year showed that older horses who had raced as 2-year-olds had a decreased risk of career-ending injury to those who had not. In 2008, Bramlage analyzed data from the Jockey Club Information Systems for runners between 1975 and 2000 and found horses who raced as 2-year-olds had more lifetime starts than those that didn’t begin racing until they were older. Average lifetime earnings for those that had started as 2-year-olds were almost double those who had not, and average per start earnings and percent stakes winners were also higher for those who ran at two. “This data is definitive,” Bramlage told the Jockey Club Round Table that year. “It shows that horses that began racing as 2-year-olds are much more successful, have much longer careers, and, by extrapolation, show less predisposition to injury than horses that did not begin racing until their 3-year-old year. It is absolute on all the data sets that the training and racing of 2-year-old Thoroughbreds has no ill effect on the horses' race-career longevity or quality. In fact, the data would indicate that the ability to make at least one start as a 2-year-old has a very strong positive affect on the longevity and success of a racehorse.” But, he says, there is a caveat: horses are individuals. You can’t expect all horses to respond to training exactly the same way at two years old or three years old. Forcing a horse who is not ready to make a start at two is not good either. That's why a trainer needs to be incredibly observant. “People have asked me, ‘What do you think makes a good trainer?’” he said. “I think there’s one thing that separates trainers from top to bottom and that’s the ability to tell when a horse is happy, because horses that are training well and adapting well like to train. The good trainers can watch the horse and train them to the edge of their physiology but pick out when they’re beginning to get behind, and slow them down or stop them.” Horses, like people, have a lot of individuality in how quickly they reach peak athletic ability. All horses experience rapid growth at relatively similar rates, but they don’t all put the pieces together (bone, soft tissue, mental, cardiovascular maturity) at exactly the same point in their lives. A trainer has to know what type of individual they’re dealing with, and they have to spot when that horse hasn’t been able to adjust quickly enough to their workload. “When you went to school, there was probably one guy in your class that was shaving in the fifth grade,” Bramlage said. “That guy matured early and is going to be the best athlete early, maybe the first few years of high school. But they, for the most part, get passed up by those that mature a little later but mature a little further.” This factors into training for 2-year-old sales, too. Bramlage said there are especially precocious horses who do put all their pieces together at the right time to safely prepare for and enter a 2-year-old in training sale. Some do not. The trick is knowing, or quickly assessing, whether the individual can handle the pace of training. One of the most difficult things about injury prevention is that veterinarians don’t have hard and fast rules to know how long a stress/repair cycle is for bone after a hard bout of training or a race. This makes it harder to strike the balance between challenging the skeleton enough to improve bone strength, while giving it time to adjust before challenging it again. Bramlage said recently, members of the Jockey Club’s Thoroughbred Safety Committee have analyzed data on starts and auction appearances and found that each trip through a sale ring – yearlings and 2-year-old sales – increases a horse’s probability of ultimately making a start. There is some selectivity to that data, however, because horses who can’t stand the rigors of preparation for a breeze-up sale probably don’t end up going through the sale. Bramlage said the same is true for yearlings prepping for sale: some respond well and some are slow in responding. “There certainly are horses who can’t stand training against the calendar, because that’s the whole difference,” he said. “Horses that are able to do that, get selected out of the group. You’ve selected the horses that stand up to training earlier and better. Our whole racing calendar rewards precocious horses with entry-limited and purse-supplemented races during their 2- and 3-year-old years. But there are certainly later maturing individuals that ultimately reach higher levels. “What people have to realize is there is a population of 2-year-olds in training who could suffer from the 2-year-old in training sales if you’re not cognizant of the fact they are not responding fast enough. If you keep trying to train them, they can get injured. Training is an art.” What about training horses at two and waiting to let them run at three? Or preventing injuries by focusing on long, slow work and avoiding speed? The science doesn’t support that, either. “Monotonous training is not good for the bone,” said Bramlage. “This idea that we’re going to gallop them lots and lots of miles and that way we’ll make bones stronger and stronger doesn’t work. Bone trains to the level of exercise, not the amount. Hearts and lungs and muscles, they train a lot to the amount of exercise, but bone trains to the level. “A horse’s bone is going to get stronger at the level of his fastest furlong. But if he goes 10 furlongs in his training exercise, the last nine furlongs are actually wear and tear on the bone. If you continue that wear and tear over and over, the skeleton may not keep up. So, putting lots of monotonous exercise on a horse doesn’t get you a stronger skeleton. Training at a gradually increasing level without overdoing it does get you a stronger horse.” Ultimately, the questions surrounding 2-year-old racing and training don’t have simple, black and white answers. If the evidence was clear and unanimous that one course of action (like eliminating or mandating 2-year-old racing) was likely to improve equine safety, then rule-making would be easy. As it is, Bramlage points out that there are no peer-reviewed studies that have shown training and racing 2-year-olds increases their risk for injury. Like so many other aspects of training and management, making the right decision is an art, which should be informed by science.

https://www.hawkeyeinnovations.com/hawkreplay So the delays which vary is a staffing/logistics issue as opposed to technology.

Well I didn't ask the question first however it does seem strange that the race videos are normally posted on NZTR within two races of being run. Does the Stewards video get sent to a different location? Or does it sit in the outside broadcast van until back to base? It has to be available oncourse for the Stewards to review.

Are you suggesting they still courier tapes to HQ? You don't actual need a high speed fibre link although wasn't that a reason why some courses couldn't run races? The stewards vision is loaded up to YouTube which you could do with a 4G link from your laptop.

No it wasn't it was an out of context zoomed in shot taken by you while you sat in your underwear watching the TV. Good point about Omakau all the same.

When I let you post on here. It's hilarious.

Only in your salacious mind. Hypocrite.

So all the palaver about courses having high speed data links is rubbish? I would have hought the stewards vision was streamed back to HQ in real time I.e. not reliant on someone delivering a tape! The more likely reason is there was no one in the office on that day.

I gather you approve of the pervert @Thomass imagery? Oh the irony. One minute holier than thou nek minute...

Nothing other than a whole lot of sunk cost assets. Although they'd argue they have to pay for TAB terminal operators and security. You would think that Food and Alcohol would pay for themselves given the markup. Why not make New Years Day a Family Free Day.

Yeah well he reckons there was a good crowd there yesterday. Probably in the kiddies castle with @TAB For Ever.

Then why charge $30 General Admission?

Assuming that it isn't a parallax error caused by where the pictured was taken from it would have no impact on a Jockey as they are supposed to ride through the line. The 20 centimetre (if it exists) is less than a 1/1000th of a second.

Haven't you watched the Ruakaka races for nearly two years?

Yep @Thomass has another special needs topic for the next decade.

Don't know but looking at attendance purely from a betting perspective is flawed in my opinion. Attendance on raceday is more about access to the sport. So a $30 entry fee is prohibitive if you want to have a look and take the family to something a bit different than the zoo for a couple of hours.

35 degrees C?

Somehow their marketing missed the mark. General Admission at $30 is a bit steep too if you want to take mum and the kids for a day out. Especially when the hotdogs are $8+ each!! When you have all that sunk cost in assets a General Admission fee of a gold coin donation per person would be better than no one attending.

Willo booked to ride La Dorada in the KM.

Geez Heveldt is calling the post race review an Aftermath now.

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