Jason Teaz eyeing up Harness 5000 with latest Alexandra Park winner

[Wandering Eyes]

By Michael Guerin

Jason Teaz is aiming to end the harness racing season way better than he started it.

Actually, the start wasn’t the problem for the Waikato trainer. It was the couple of months after the start that flattened him.

Teaz is best known as a commentator but is making quite the name for himself as a trainer, with 15 horses in work and well on the way to his best season ever with Stone Cold bringing up win 13 for the term at Alexandra Park on Friday night.

But there is a lot more to that number than you might think. 

“Back at one of the first meetings of the season at Otaki I trained a double so things couldn’t have started better,” says Teaz.

“Two days later those same two horses ran last and so did almost every other horse I lined up for two months.

“The whole team got a bug through it and around about the same time I had changed my feed and that didn’t work and everything went to the pack.

“I reckon people were thinking, what is going on with him, but I just had to weather the storm.”

Teaz has trained 10 or 11 winners in his last 50 starts though and is getting good results, sometimes with other people’s castoffs.

“I am really proud of how it is going and I suppose with 15 horses I am no longer considered a small trainer.

“But Alexandra Park wins are still hard to come by so to get one with this guy is great and he is far from finished.”

Teaz bought Stone Cold as a yearling because he had another handy trotter by sire Wishing Stone and his owners are spread far and wide.

“My mother Helen is in him as are Allan and Mark Bradley. Allan is a West Coast farmer who had a really good horse called Besta Kara a fair while ago.

“And we have Art Shirley from down south, our Clerk of the Course up here in Ron Weller, former HRNZ chair John Coulam and of course Nicole.”

Nicole as in Sims, the trackside presenter who used to work with Teaz and took a share in the diminutive trotter soon after he bought him and had now had the thrill of being at Alexandra Park on a Friday night when Stone Cold made it career win number two.

“We have a great bunch of owners and he is doing a wonderful job for them,” says Teaz.

“He has already won about $35,000, after only costing I think $5000 at the sales, and he is still only getting to full maturity now.”

Teaz says he is eyeing the Harness 5000 series at Ashburton in December as the Four-Year-Old Trot division doesn’t appear to have an overly strong field at the moment for a $60,000 race.

“We will keep monitoring how the field is coming together but that is the dream goal,” says Teaz.

“I think he is eligible now and with some of his owners living down south I am sure they’d love it.”

Matthew White had looked the horseman to follow at The Park on Friday and so it proved to be as he trained two winners in Mediator and Lord Popinjay (for Monika Ranger) and drove another in Tight Lines for Brian and Gareth Hughes.

Opa’s Girl was very good in a strong juvenile race for trainer Arna Donnelly two hours before he older brother Double Parked won his Metro Pacing Heat.

The latter was the first leg of a training and driving double for Tony Herlihy with the super impressive Youneverknow.

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