People underdressed for the spring soaking hid under umbrellas, rubbish bins, chairs and each other, while others embraced their inner child and had hail-ball fights.<\/p>\n
The race meeting was delayed for one race (40 minutes) and it felt odds-on racing would be cancelled.<\/p>\n
But the hail stopped and those who hadn\u2019t headed home did what Cantabrians do: got on with it, ordered another drink and tried to find the winner of the next race.<\/p>\n
After stewards had conferred with jockeys, the meeting went on \u2013 but what had been a heavy 8 track but likely to improve had turned into a genuine heavy, with a cover of hail balls \u2013 track conditions never quite seen here before.<\/p>\n
Some favourites, like Platinum Attack in the Stewards, were scratched and others who weren\u2019t clearly didn\u2019t handle the conditions.<\/p>\n
Jockeys started to come wide looking for better conditions but the longer the meeting went on, the less it mattered as the whole track was soaked.<\/p>\n
By Guineas time it was anybody\u2019s guess what might unfold as the market went haywire, punters unsure which horses would handle the wet and the weirdness.<\/p>\n
Ultimately it was Romanoff, a son of great wet-track stallion Belardo, who out-toughed the rest.<\/p>\n
He was clearly the second string of the Gerard pair in the market, but Queiroz went where others fear to tread by angling towards the inside after sitting fourth during the early part of the race.<\/p>\n
He then waited as long as he could before pushing the button \u2013 but just when it looked like he might have stolen the Guineas, his more favoured stablemate Affirmative Action closed and right on the line, dived.<\/p>\n
It looked like he had won, jockey George Rooke celebrating \u2013 and he wasn\u2019t alone.<\/p>\n
But while Romanoff may have lost the Guineas a stride before the line, that isn\u2019t where they pay the money, and the tough little fella got his nose back in front at exactly the right moment.<\/p>\n
Punters, jockeys and Gerard waited before it was confirmed this was Romanoff\u2019s Guineas \u2013 just \u2013 as he\u2019d regained the edge over his stablemate.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be honest I was nervous when the rain came and didn\u2019t know what to expect,\u201d said Gerard, who trained Savaglee to a far easier Guineas win last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously both horses have gone great races and I am thrilled for their owners, and for Bruno.\u201d<\/p>\n
Queiroz rode 16 Group 1 winners in his native Brazil and has ended up in New Zealand after he moved to Singapore a year before racing there sadly closed down.<\/p>\n
Like many on-track, Queiroz thought he had been beaten on the line, his face a picture of shocked joy when the judge announced Romanoff as the winner. <\/p>\n
Queiroz thanked trainer Gerard, Romanoff and the horse\u2019s owners.<\/p>\n
He also thanked God. Which seems fair, because this may have been a Guineas win that fell from the heavens.<\/p>\n
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald\u2019s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world\u2019s biggest horse racing carnivals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People underdressed for the spring soaking hid under umbrellas, rubbish bins, chairs and each other, while others embraced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":136326,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[11689,93169,3043,124,5972,5136,15124,31177,36338,5268,111,139,69,1118,90,2847,3111,93168,93166,4514,213,93165,1961,8489,93167],"class_list":["post-136325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-11689","tag-93169","tag-call","tag-could","tag-day","tag-drama","tag-fight","tag-guineas","tag-judges","tag-lose","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-on","tag-only","tag-out","tag-racedays","tag-riccartons","tag-same","tag-sports","tag-stablemates","tag-this","tag-trainer","tag-wildest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=136325"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/136325\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/136326"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=136325"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=136325"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=136325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}