Chief Stipe

I reckon there is a lot of upside to this filly. Still has a good frame to fill and the way she was cheekily annoying the commentators horse coming back to scale showed the race took nothing out of her at least mentally. No wonder JMac will do anything to keep the ride!

Coolangatta: She came, she saw and she conquered Coolangatta wins the Magic Millions 2YO Classic under jockey James McDonald. Picture: Grant Peters – Trackside Photography. By Trenton Akers 09:16pm • 15 January 2022 5 Comments The racecaller anointed her the hottest girl on the Gold Coast and Coolangatta might just be the hottest filly in racing after taking out the Magic Millions 2YO Classic in a ding-dong battle against Russian Conquest. A raging odds-on favourite since markets opened, trainer Ciaron Maher has carried the weight of expectation with Coolangatta since her debut win in the Gimcrack in October but he delivered on the biggest stage to land the $2m race. Maher and co-trainer David Eustace have done their best to keep a lid on the hype surrounding their filly in the lead up to the race while superstar jockey James McDonald has gone to great lengths to ensure he is free to ride her. Acknowledging the long build up, Maher said Saturday’s triumph was more of a relief than anything as he now sets her for a Group 1 Golden Slipper campaign in the Sydney autumn carnival. “There is a big team but this is what it is all about,” Maher said. “To win on the big days is what it is all about. “It was a long build up with her, she was favourite for a long time. It’s a relief when they start those odds and eventually win.” Rarely can a horse live up to the boom placed on it after one start but Maher has managed to maintain the rage with Coolangatta, who now has $1.4m next to her name after three starts for her group of prominent owners. McDonald was cool, calm and collected when dealt barrier 13 and managed to get her one off the fence before the turn before confidently popping out three wide. While she cruised up in her typically dominant fashion, there were nervous moments for favourite backers and connections when McDonald suddenly asked for her top effort. The Peter and Paul Snowden-trained Russian Conquest ($5.50) threw down the gauntlet under Kerrin McEvoy when she ranged up at the 300m mark, with the pair eventually clearing out on the rest of the field. Just as she looked ready to roll the favourite however, McDonald dug deep into his bag of tricks to get a final effort out of Coolangatta which saw her find again and win in a tight finish. “He might have gone a bit early,” Maher laughed. “When he went early he made me a little bit nervous. “He is good under pressure, he is a great man and a great jockey and he knew what he had underneath him.” McDonald cut short a lucrative trip to Hong Kong in December to ensure he would be back in Australia long enough to ride Coolangatta on Boxing Day and Saturday’s success is the culmination of a long-term plan. Coolangatta wins the Magic Millions 2YO Classic. Picture by Luke Marsden. “She has been such a hyped horse,” McDonald said. “She has been a dominant favourite for a long time, it has been a big build up from a long way out, this makes it all worthwhile. “The team does a great job with her, it doesn’t always work out but today it has. Barrier 13 was a blessing and it worked out beautifully.” It caps off a golden year for McDonald, who before Saturday had never won a Magic Millions 2YO Classic, adding to his Melbourne Cup victory in November. The victory is another big-race success for prominent owners Ozzie Kheir and Brae Sokolski who won the Melbourne Cup, Caulfield Cup and Victorian Derby during the spring carnival. “(This is) Every bit as good,” Sokolski said. “It’s so fulfilling because of the nature of it, you’re up against every other owner buying the yearlings hoping and dreaming of being here. “I have been unlucky in this race in the past so to win one of these is just so good. She has been winning with her brilliance in her first two starts but today she won with heart which shows she has the courage of a champion.” Bookmakers were quick to mark Coolangatta a $4 favourite for the Golden Slipper to be run on March 19.

Correct and by far the majority of horses handle it.

What's a well designed crossing? They'll all similar. That's the way it is.

I've been watching the stream. It seams to boil down to whether his presence in OZ will encourage civil disobedience against the OZ Government Covid mandates. His Lawyer pointed out that assuming that that was correct then sending him home would probably elicit more. I think it will come down to whether or not the Minister of Immigration has the power to veto someone entering the country based on nothing but his political whim. Normally the judiciary don't like that. They're not debating his vaccination status, prior infection or even if he is negative. That seems irrelevant.

That was 25 years ago. Regardless of whether they did or did not do the right action then as in TWENTY FIVE years ago they haven't done ANYTHING since. One would have expected at least 4 major renovations in that time not NONE!

You've fallen into the same hole as @Pitman and @Reefton and the one that all the market gardeners of the Bombay Hills in South Auckland fell into. You can't continue to crop in a mono-culture fashion and expect to fix the issues that arise by mechanical means. As for an educated farmer - I thought your expertise was in sociology? Even today's dairy farmers know that you cannot continue to mono-crop pasture without putting something back in other than a tiller or a groundhog!!!!!

Instead of trying to listen to SENZ tune into the Federal Court Case now....

Inadequate horse training.

I don't know how up to date that list is. Coppins says he works on Radio Trackside.

Entriviere was lame after the race. Elliot suspended 8 days and fined $4k.

If the race was hand timed how did they get all these sectionals? They must do it off the video.

I timed the video several times and actually got a quicker time than the official one.

Wanted: Cable 1210m in length to connect to electronic timing system. If there are any electricians out there that could offer their time and materials as a donation to the WRC please contact them asap. https://wellingtonracing.co.nz/ WRC Committee Wayne Guppy - President A former pharmacist, I am currently the Mayor of Upper Hutt. I have been a Member of the WRC since 1981, a Member of the NZTBA and have represented the WRC on the RACE Inc board for a number of years. I am currently Chair of the NZTR mbers Council. I have raced horses successfully in Australia and am currently a small breeder with several horses in training. I am committed to ensuring Trentham becomes the top premier track in the country and is further integrated with the greater Wellington region enabling the region to benefit from having the number one track in the country. Sam Walker - Vice President Co-opted to the Committee during the 2018-2019 season and confirmed his postion being elected unopposed at the 2018 AGM Ray Southey - Committee Managing Partner. Member of Wellington Racing Club since 1973. Lifetime involvement in Racing, active owner and Breeder for 30 years. Member of Masterton Racing committee for over 20 years. 2 periods as President, current vice president Wairarapa Harness Club and trustee Masterton Licensing Trust Trentham is the premier racecourse in New Zealand and we must continue with recent program and improvements, and be aware of the needs and concerns of all involved in the industry form members, owners, trainers, punters and the importance of sponsors. Des Coppins - Committee Des has been involved in racing much of his life. He started as a statistician/form compiler for the Best Bets before joining the INL group to become a racing writer for NZ Truth and Friday Flash before becoming Editor of Friday Flash. Des is director of Des Coppins Racing & Marketing having worked in sales & marketing for the Radioworks hosting Tracktalk on Radio Pacific. Des runs the talkback racing show on Radio Trackside and is co-presenter of the First Call on Trackside. Des has been in syndicates and raced many horses, his most successful being the Group Two winner Soap Opera Colin Dallas – Committee My first involvement with racing came in the form of a syndicate of horses about 15 years ago. This along with the pure interest of the racing industry gave me an insight as to how much fun and excitement you can gain by being involved. Being a Committee Member is a great opportunity for me to share in the overall passion for this sport and I would like to see more younger people raising their hand and wanting to either become new members or taking an ownership of a horse. The excitement is just something that can be enjoyed immeasurably. Jessica Meech- Committee I have been a Member and Raceday Steward of the WRC since 2010 and was elected to the Committee in 2014. I am currently Head of Risk and Regulatory Affairs at the NZRB. I’m a practising lawyer and worked at Chapman Tripp, prior to the NZRB. I am a proud owner having raced many horses throughout the Country, however yet to have a single winner at Trentham! My aim is to restore the Champagne Turf to its glory days. I want to see the WRC become a successful commercial operation, that can provide quality racing on a frequent basis and an exceptional experience for participants. Euan Playle- Committee I have been a member of WRC since 1985 and over the years I have been lucky enough to experience many aspects of the WRC as a race goer, member and owner. I am a Chartered Accountant and a partner in a Chartered Accounting firm. I am now in a position where I have the time and energy to put something back into the Club. I am fully aware of the challenges previously and currently the racing industry faces including the challenges of our sponsors and existing and future members of the WRC. We have something special at Trentham and I believe we can preserve and improve the Clubs future Salve Barnao - Committee Co-opted on to the Committee during the 2018-2019 season Steve Drummond - Committee Co-opted on to the Committee during the 2018-2019 season Simon Barber - Committee Co-opted on to the Committee during the 2020-2021 season

But they've done NOTHING except let their main turf track deteriorate.

Should be able to time it accurately by counting the video frames.

Well the "experts" said JMac went too early on Coolangatta. Only too early if you get beaten.

So not a World Record. Unbelievable.

The epidemic of the vaccinated ByNeville Hodgkinson - January 10, 2022 AT FIRST I thought it might be a watershed moment. Steve James, a consultant anaesthetist treating Covid patients since the start of the pandemic, coolly challenged Sajid Javid last week over compulsory Covid jabs for NHS staff. ‘I’m not happy about that’, James said in a widely viewed video of the encounter reported by TCW yesterday. ‘I had Covid at some point, I’ve got antibodies . . . the vaccines are reducing transmission only for about eight weeks for Delta, with Omicron it’s probably less. And for that, I would be dismissed if I don’t have a vaccine? The science isn’t strong enough . . . If you want to provide protection with a booster, you’d have to inject everybody every month. It’s not going to achieve a practical benefit.’ The Health Secretary, clearly discomfited, said he respected Dr James’s views but insisted the government takes the ‘very best advice’ from vaccine experts. Sky News showed the video, but just in case we might get rebellious ideas, they offered a link to an earlier interview – first shown on December 22 – headlined ‘Doctor dismantles typical vaccine hesitancy arguments’. And King’s College Hospital in south London, where the encounter took place, issued a pusillanimous statement distancing themselves from the consultant’s remarks. Thus, the drive to inflict on everyone this experimental gene product, which persuades our bodies to produce millions of copies of a toxic blood-clotting protein, and which has broken all records for adverse event reports including thousands of deaths and injuries, continues. It is deeply depressing. All the more so given that the latest UK data show the jab’s effectiveness to be plummeting across all age groups, and even to have become negative in most recipients in the month to January 2 this year. The only group in which it remained positive were those aged 18 and under, and even in them there was a sharp drop. ‘Negative effectiveness’, as the analyst Dr Will Jones explains, means the vaccinated are becoming infected at higher rates than the unvaccinated. A vaccine effectiveness of minus 100 per cent means the vaccinated are twice as likely to be infected as the unjabbed. ‘Booster’ doses brought temporary improvement in infection rates but those are now almost completely cancelled out by the arrival and rapid spread of the Omicron variant. The same phenomenon is being seen across several highly vaccinated countries, as this report by science writer Alex Berenson shows. So, contrary to what ministers such as Javid are being told by their advisers, some of whom are compromised by their Big Pharma links, this is rapidly becoming an epidemic of the vaccinated. Independent scientists have long predicted such an outcome, pointing out that as the vaccine is very specific in the antibodies it stimulates, it prepares the immune system to respond to just one feature of the genetically-engineered Covid virus. Mass vaccination, as opposed to targeted protection of vulnerable people, drives the virus into producing variants which readily by-pass the immunity produced. This is why the vaccinated are so vulnerable to Omicron, a variant with very high transmissibility. However, people exposed to the naturally circulating virus – especially chronically exposed NHS staff such as Steve James – are more likely to mount a full and lasting defence against all its key components, and therefore to be more resistant to variants such as Omicron. Javid seemed from his comments to be unaware of this fact. Also, as described here when Omicron appeared, scientists were able to show from the start that it had mutated in ways that gave it less chance of causing serious illness in humans. That was why Dr Angelique Coetzee, the South African doctor who identified it, agreed that far from being a cause for renewed panic, exposure to the variant with its much milder symptoms could help build natural immunity across the population. Asked by Nigel Farage on GB News if the British were over-reacting, she said: ‘It doesn’t matter how many times we are saying it’s a mild disease, some people or some scientists don’t really want to believe us.’ We can thank our lucky stars that the Prime Minister overruled his advisers on that one, saving Christmas. Summarising, Alex Berenson says: ‘All we really know is that the vaccines don’t prevent infection for very long and for many healthy people have side effects that are significantly worse than coronavirus infection. Both those facts were true before Omicron. Both are doubly true now.’ I keep being reminded of a poem learned in my schooldays, which went: ‘Twould ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs For ‘Parson’, substitute ‘Sage and the mass media who so blindly and uncritically pass on their doctrines’, and you’ll get my meaning.

Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete There is no evidence so far that vaccines are reducing infections from the fast-spreading variant. By Luc Montagnier and Jed Rubenfeld Jan. 9, 2022 5:20 pm ET SAVE PRINT TEXT 2,120 ILLUSTRATION: DAVID GOTHARD Federal courts considering the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates—including the Supreme Court at Friday’s oral argument—have focused on administrative-law issues. The decrees raise constitutional issues as well. But there’s a simpler reason the justices should stay these mandates: the rise of the Omicron variant. It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here. OPINION: POTOMAC WATCH The Supreme Court Hears Vaccine Mandate Arguments 00:00 1x SUBSCRIBE Both mandates—from the Health and Human Services Department for healthcare workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for large employers in many other industries—were issued Nov. 5. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both agencies appropriately considered Delta at length and in detail, finding that the vaccines remained effective against it. Those findings are now obsolete. As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.” The Supreme Court held in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905) that the right to refuse medical treatment could be overcome when society needs to curb the spread of a contagious epidemic. At Friday’s oral argument, all the justices acknowledged that the federal mandates rest on this rationale. But mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death). As the World Health Organization puts it, “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.” For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence. The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection. Confirming this negative efficacy finding, data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people. Meantime, it has long been known that vaccinated people with breakthrough infections are highly contagious, and preliminary data from all over the world indicate that this is true of Omicron as well. As CDC Director Rochelle Walensky put it last summer, the viral load in the noses and throats of vaccinated people infected with Delta is “indistinguishable” from that of unvaccinated people, and “what [the vaccines] can’t do anymore is prevent transmission.” There is some early evidence that boosters may reduce Omicron infections, but the effect appears to wane quickly, and we don’t know if repeated boosters would be an effective response to the surge of Omicron. That depends among other things on the severity of disease Omicron causes, another great unknown. According to the CDC, the overwhelming majority of symptomatic U.S. Omicron cases have been mild. The best policy might be to let Omicron run its course while protecting the most vulnerable, naturally immunizing the vast majority against Covid through infection by a relatively benign strain. As Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the U.K.’s Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said in a recent interview, “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four or six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable.” In any event, the vaccine mandates before the court don’t require boosters. They define “fully vaccinated” as two doses of Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech or one dose of Johnson & Johnson. Even if boosters would help, the mandates would leave tens or hundreds of thousands of unboosted employees on the job, who have zero or negative protection against Omicron infection, and who would be highly contagious if they become infected. In other words, there is no scientific basis for believing these mandates will curb the spread of the disease. Omicron was mentioned sparsely at Friday’s oral argument, but the justices—particularly those most favorable to the mandates—appeared to labor under drastically false assumptions. Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that if mandatory vaccination went forward, that would prevent all new Covid infections—750,000 new cases every day, he said. This is wildly false. So is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that “we have over 100,000 children . . . in serious condition, many on ventilators.” According to Health and Human Services Department data, there are currently fewer than 3,500 confirmed pediatric Covid hospitalizations, and that includes patients who tested positive and were hospitalized for other reasons. It is axiomatic in U.S. law that courts don’t uphold agency directives when the agency has entirely failed to consider facts crucial to the problem. In many contexts courts send regulations back to the agency for reconsideration in light of dramatically changed circumstances. If the agency’s action “is not sustainable on the record itself, the proper judicial approach has been to vacate the action and to remand the matter back to the agency for further consideration,” as the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia put it. Neither HHS nor OSHA ever considered Omicron or said a word about vaccine efficacy against it, for the simple reason that it hadn’t yet been discovered. In these circumstances, longstanding legal principles require the justices to stay the mandates and send them back to the agencies for a fresh look. Dr. Montagnier was a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus. Mr. Rubenfeld is a constitutional scholar. WSJ Opinion: Supreme Court Hears Arguments on Two Covid Mandates YOU MAY ALSO LIKE UP NEXT 0:00 / 5:55 0:00 WSJ Opinion: Supreme Court Hears Arguments on Two Covid Mandates

Well that's all easily fixed - just change what is in the fridge for Curious and his missus. Oh except the aircon.....did you watch the races inside? As for the queues well my fix would that would be to have a few mobile hostesses showing all the old stale males how to use their smart phones. BTW did many miss out on getting their bet on? Perhaps a Bookie and a bag man would have helped!

Not sure I agree with the "far too early" comment. Made it impossible for anything to come from behind her. As for his other rides on Levante she didn't help herself much by getting back too far early. A classic example of that is Entriviere today. Have no idea why they decided to ride who back today. Levante is starting better this season.

1:06.18 for 1200m. 1385843228_Race8JRNBERKETTTELEGRAPHatWELLINGTONRCon15JAN2022LOVERACINGNZ.mp4

Um who forgot to connect the power cable to the outside gates?

Geez....didn't realise they had run a World Record in the Telegraph!! 1:06.18.