It's In The Blood

Significance

“It’s called line-breeding when it works, and in-breeding when it doesn’t,” is the old line, the sardonic joke that salves some of the wounds from the capricious lottery of making horses.   Fine lines indeed.   They’re being put under the microscope again, and in this instance starting to bear results, with a horse named Significance –... Read More

Isotope

As a punter, if you get overs, you’re often waiting for a rude awakening: those despised words as you confirm your bet – “Win odds have changed” – or the dreaded scratching of the favourite at the barrier, and its loathsome companion, deductions.   Similarly, when you’re buying horses and you score unders, you might be... Read More

Elite Street

Sometimes in breeding and racing you’re rewarded for your own judgement. Sometimes other people’s decisions work for you.  The latter is the case concerning former WA Supreme Court judge Robert Anderson and Elite Street, who completed an undulating journey in rising from fourth in a Pinjarra maiden six months ago to becoming a Group 1... Read More

Inspirational Girl

Inspirational Girl landed a windfall for favourite backers who crunched her from $3.50 to $2.60 in taking the Railway Stakes at Ascot last Saturday, becoming the first Group 1 winner bred by New Zealand’s Jamieson Park stud.  The West Australian mare – yet another from breeder Bob Peters’ cerise and white production line – had... Read More

Hindaam

In racing and breeding, sometimes champagne and caviar can come disguised as flat beer and sardines, with one person’s poison morphing into another person’s meat.  In 2013, Gai Waterhouse and James Harron Bloodstock shelled out half a million dollars for a well-bred yearling – by Fastnet Rock out of Legally Bay.  She was a bay,... Read More

Bivouac

We all know the definition of insanity as stated by Albert Einstein: Doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.  Yet with all due respect to the man, mentioned in dispatches as being no midweek maiden above the shoulders, doing the same thing repeatedly and seeing the same result isn’t necessarily a... Read More