But that was on a good track, whereas Te Rapa is threatening to be heavy for Saturday\u2019s $400,0000 Howden Insurance Mile meeting, which also includes the $175,000 Timberspan Hawkes Bay Guineas.<\/p>\n
Te Rapa was rated a Heavy 9 on Wednesday with more rain expected and that will not suit Horse of the Year and Marsh\u2019s flag-flyer El Vencedor.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is not what we want, very obviously,\u201d Marsh told the Herald.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t see it being anything but heavy and ideally we would scratch him but he is a big horse who can\u2019t afford to miss races.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe considered the Matamata Cup next week but the weather doesn\u2019t look great for much of next week either and he\u2019d get topweight, which I think would be 61kgs.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we are pretty much resigned to starting on Saturday knowing that he doesn\u2019t really like heavy tracks these days.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what then becomes a pass mark for the $6.50 equal-third-favourite?<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t see him winning on a heavy but if he could finish anywhere from third to sixth, we\u2019d accept that and move on to the Livamol.\u201d<\/p>\n
The question marks over the weather have plenty of trainers second-guessing their teams and waiting until the final track conditions on Saturday morning before really knowing what to expect.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think a heavy really suits any of my team that much,\u201d Marsh said.<\/p>\n
On paper, the Howden Insurance is a beauty, stacked with seven previous Group 1 winners and plenty who have won well enough at the next level down to take the step up.<\/p>\n
Mares like Legarto (barrier 3) and La Crique (6) may have seemed the winners in yesterday\u2019s barrier draw but low barriers could easily become less than advantageous if the inside of the track cuts up by late in the day on Saturday.<\/p>\n
All of this has left the TAB bookies as confused as everybody else, with Legarto and La Crique opening the equal $5 favourites while El Vencedor shares the $6.50 next line with Quintessa, whose trainer Sam Bergerson has already indicated he won\u2019t start on a really heavy track.<\/p>\n
To further complicate matters, there is no shortage of heavy-track winning form in the race \u2013 but most of it belongs to horses who possibly aren\u2019t racing at their best at the moment.<\/p>\n
The most obvious exception is Sterling Express, who won the Foxbridge Plate on a Heavy 8 on this track two starts ago and looked right up to Group 1 level when fourth after racing three and four wide in the Proisir Plate at Ellerslie on September 6.<\/p>\n
The head-scratching will continue in the Group 2 Hawkes Bay Guineas, which has drawn an even field in which almost every horse has won one race but none have won two.<\/p>\n
One of the favourites is Quondo, who will be representing champion stallion Wootton Bassett, who left the breeding industry stunned when he had to be put down in Australia on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The exceptional stallion with an amazing back story got sick at Coolmore Stud in New South Wales and deteriorated to the point he could not be saved, in a tragedy for his connections and the breeding industry in both hemispheres.<\/p>\n
Howden Insurance Mile<\/p>\n
$400,000, 1600m at Te Rapa at 4.04pm on Saturday,<\/p>\n
1: El Vencedor (barrier 11)<\/p>\n
2: Ladies Man (13)<\/p>\n
3: Waitak (15)<\/p>\n
4: Sharp N Smart (12)<\/p>\n
5: Whangaehu (5)<\/p>\n
6: Sterling Express (9)<\/p>\n
7: Habana (2)<\/p>\n
8: Matscot (10)<\/p>\n
9: Herbert (8)<\/p>\n
10: Tuxedo (14)<\/p>\n
11: Legarto (3)<\/p>\n
12: La Crique (6)<\/p>\n
13: Quintessa (4)<\/p>\n
14: Qali Al Farrsaha (7)<\/p>\n
15: Val Do Zoldo (1)<\/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":"But that was on a good track, whereas Te Rapa is threatening to be heavy for Saturday\u2019s $400,0000…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[66270,13673,1753,41775,20646,9351,4995,3004,101,37957,1777,56,54,55,1068,5595,1942],"class_list":["post-157881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-racing","tag-happy","tag-horse","tag-like","tag-marsh","tag-may","tag-not","tag-of","tag-racing","tag-sports","tag-stephen","tag-the","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-weather","tag-week","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}