From there, the only question was whether Well Written could slingshot Alabama Lass, a question that lingered far longer than Marsh and the punters who took the $1.50 would have liked.<\/p>\n
Alabama Lass was racing at a 1400m distance further than her best, but at the 300m mark she gave a kick that would have made her late co-trainer Bev Kelso proud \u2013 and that emotional fairytale win was a fleeting possibility.<\/p>\n
But then Well Written got balanced up and showed the turbo button that has made her one of the most exciting New Zealand horses in years.<\/p>\n
She swept past Alabama Lass at the 100m and won going away, the ideal comeback capped with a $500,000 bonus as the first NZB Kiwi runner from last season to win a domestic Group 1, a bonus that lasted all of one race.<\/p>\n
Marsh has experienced some emotional moments on racetracks in the past few years though it rarely spills out publicly.<\/p>\n
But relief poured out of him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t usually get nervous before a race or that emotional after but so many people want her to win and keep winning so this means a lot,\u201d Marsh said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlabama Lass kicked really hard and did Ken and Bev so proud so to get her and win going away was a good performance for a mare who still hasn\u2019t actually turned 4 yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd Matt [Cartwright] rode her perfectly.\u201d But the relief runs deeper than that.<\/p>\n
New Zealand racing has a wonderful history of sensational 3-year-old fillies but many don\u2019t return to the mountaintop at 4. <\/p>\n
Well Written has done that now with a Group 1 against the older horses, and it means her spring dreams are still alive.<\/p>\n
Those dreams are the A$1.5 million ($1.83m) Epsom at Group 1 under handicap conditions over 1600m at Randwick on October 3, followed by the A$10m Golden Eagle on the same track over 1500m on October 31.<\/p>\n
Well Written still could have targeted those races had she been beaten today, but they would have started to seem unobtainable or wishful, and attention could have easily turned to a mares-only race to try to seal that Australian Group 1 win needed for her breeding career.<\/p>\n
Not now.<\/p>\n
Well Written\u2019s victory has proved she is better than last season and ready to cross the Tasman, especially as the Epsom is a handicap in which she is expected to get around 54.5kg.<\/p>\n
She sat at the head of the Epsom market at $4 tonight.<\/p>\n
That great race will still be incredibly hard to win and the Golden Eagle, headlined by the sensational Sheza Alibi, even harder four weeks later.<\/p>\n
But on this first Saturday in spring, unbeaten in seven starts and with Australian glory beckoning, Well Written was keeping dreams alive.<\/p>\n
Just how good, or great, how ready or even how special Well Written really is, we will find out in the next two months.<\/p>\n
But for now there is no doubting she is the best horse in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
And still perfect.<\/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":"From there, the only question was whether Well Written could slingshot Alabama Lass, a question that lingered far…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[5831,95,10748,16834,36980,1888,26522,60620,111,139,69,29392,39655,36061,1974,213,49519,107,6436,13632],"class_list":["post-591113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-alive","tag-and","tag-came","tag-dreams","tag-emotion","tag-first","tag-keeps","tag-maintains","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-perfect","tag-perfection","tag-racings","tag-record","tag-sports","tag-superstar","tag-then","tag-well","tag-written"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591113","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=591113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}