Steve Considers The Achievements Of Darren Weir This Season
Not, alas, that I know how many he has. I can only take a guess. And this musing is not confined to Weir. I’d be curious to know how many horses each trainer has – a strike rate of winners to individual horses. Another benchmark by which we may judge them. I wonder how many Steve Asmussen had when he trained 650 winners in the USA in 2009.
I can tell you that Weir had had about 440 individual runners to the middle of the May – for about 360 winners. Both are staggering numbers but do not reveal how many he has on the books.
I guess I could trawl through every race result this season and last, with a bag of pens and a very large exercise book, to establish how many individual runners in that time – but I fear I’d die before the task was completed. I would have bloody well done it, you know, when I was twenty.
Could ask them all (the trainers) but the couple that I have contacted have been a tad coy about it. Perhaps it should just be a matter of public record.
It would be no shock, you’d think, if Weir had another 100 or 200 in his name – factoring in ‘babies’, the as yet untried, recent arrivals and late starters to the racing year.
Last season Weir passed John Hawkes’ record of 334 wins when he finished the 2015/16 season on 348. This season he has those 400 Australia wide; 122 metropolitan wins in Victoria and eight Group One wins just for good measure.
His 400 wins have come, at a guess, from about 2350 starters. In Victoria, it’s 370 winners from 2255 starters.
Asmussen, by the way, had 2944 starters for his 650 winners in 2009 during a decade in the States where Asmussen’s numbers were crazy as were those of Scott Lake. Asmussen trained between 400 and 650 winners each year bar one from 2002 to 2010 while Lake had 300 plus (to a high of 528) every year from 2000 to 2009.
It’s not inconceivable that Weir could be threatening even those extraordinary numbers if he opted to set up in New South Wales as well as Victoria. And why not? He must be bursting at the seams here and fielding offers of tried horses every hour of the day.
His dominance over all in Victoria, bar the Hayes team, is staggering. Combine the two and it’s monolithic. They’ve trained 603 winners between them this season in Victoria while nobody else has yet topped the 100 mark.
In town, it’s Weir on 122 from the Hayes team on 102 for an aggregate of 224 which is precisely the number of the next 11 combined. That’s ELEVEN!
Wonder when there’ll be a draft introduced?
TASMANIA
The Tasmanian form certainly can’t be ignored these days on the mainland. Witness the brilliant win of Tshahitsi (Clangalang) at Flemington last week, not to mention the exploits of Hellova Street (Helike) earlier in the season.
I don’t think it would be entirely silly for connections to return, with Tshahitsi, for the early 1400 metre weight-for-age races of the Melbourne spring. He might catch a few off guard.
I fancy that it would also not be silly to have something on a couple of Tasmanians at Moonee Valley tomorrow. Erin’s Element (Shaft) resumes in race three and looks over the odds each-way. She’s won two trials; the frantic tempo of the race will suit and she wasn’t disgraced first-up last time in against Tshahitsi and Hellova Street.
Lord Da Vinci (Lonhro) might be similarly undervalued in race five. He too has the good horses form mentioned above; has also won a trial and looks likely to get a nice run on the speed in a 1200 metre race devoid of huge pressure. Good luck.