Premier’s Champions Challenge (Group 1)

KOMMETDIEDING met his Waterloo in the Premier’s Champions Challenge at Turffontein last Saturday when the Met and Durban July winner started odds-on but could manage only a well beaten fifth behind 66/1 shot Astrix.

For much of the race it looked just a question of when Gavin Lerena was going to press the button, so easily was the superstar travelling, but when he did his mount weakened rather than quickened, prompting his many backers to look on in a stunned silence.

The course vet reported that the favourite was fatigued but trainer Michelle Rix, speaking on Tuesday, blamed the way the race had been run with the front two travelling several lengths clear of her horse until the tap was turned on in earnest.

“Ideally we wanted two or three horses to have given him cover and then for him to have come from off the pace, as he did in the July and the Met,” she said. “But he was, in effect, doing the donkey work for those behind him.”

Acclimatise

She dismissed suggestions that the altitude had anything to do with it, saying: “He had been in Jo’burg for two months which is more than enough time to acclimatise.

“He now goes to Durban where he will have a two-week break on a farm, and we will then decide whether we are going to do the July again or the Champions Cup. He’s a stallion prospect so we want to win another Group 1 with him.”

Astrix (by Vercingetorix out of a Victory Moon mare and bred by the Riverton Stud) provided JP (Juan-Paul) van der Merwe with a welcome change of luck.

A stint in Singapore ended in disaster for van der Merwe last September when he was given a year’s suspension for failing “to take all reasonable and permissible measures to ensure his horse was given full opportunity of winning.”

With the aid of star South African lawyer Robert Bloomfield he got the charge reduced to “incompetent riding” and the suspension to six months.

Astrix, a five-year-old gelding, is trained by the in-form Paul Peter who is now more than R4 million clear of Justin Snaith at the head of the trainers’ table.

Second-placed Sparkling Water is trained by Mike de Kock who said: “She’ll be leaving for Durban this week and we think she will be a big runner in the July.”

Gavin Lerena had better luck in the other Group 1 on the card, the Computaform Sprint, when the Peter-trained Master Archie proved much too good for the favourite Big Burn. Master Archie is by Rafeef out a mare by the Prix de l’Abbaye winner Var.

LAST week’s National Yearling Sale in Johannesburg proved the big success everyone expected with the average almost 30% up on last year at R357,997 (€21,284), its highest since 2008 while the clearance rate was over 90%.

Top price of R3.3 million (€196,195), though, was but a shadow of 2019’s record-breaking R9 million.

Forest God, Varsfontein’s Silvano colt out of a Jet Master mare, was knocked down to Jehan Malherbe.