Here’s the parade ring 25 minutes before the jump. Where are the horses? Maybe they’ve cancelled the Cox Plate? I’m not too fussed as it’s not much of a betting race with Winx at $1.20 the place. Winx looks perfect and Hartnell has the cross-over noseband and is salivating furiously. Both horses parade in ear muffs but rip them off for the race. The rest is history. I was nearly tempted to have a go at a place on Yankee Rose until she had a bit of a head spasm with the jockey up.
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- Parade ring
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- Winx
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- Hartnell
I left the track promptly at 5.05 pm in a quite agreeable frame of mind. In fact, I wasn’t cursing the club’s scheduling of the race or the lousy weather. I was pondering my good fortune with two placed horses in the three-year-old fillies races, Prompt Response and I Am A Star. Not too bad for a rotten day!
At Randwick while viewing the Melbourne parade ring on my iPhone I spotted Can’t Remember prancing merrily in the first. He ran second and paid $5 in NSW. It’s always a risk horse watching at a distance like this but often enough it pays off. You have only 20 seconds or less on racing.com to form an opinion. An advantage is that it forces you to go by your first impression. Watching live in the Sydney ring I used to change my mind too often, so these days I watch them go around twice and then I head off if I haven’t spotted anything good. It’s an interesting question. How long should you watch them parade? I checked out Geoffrey’s selections on my Foxtel replay. Prompt Response (race 3) looked fairly relaxed during the 15 seconds allotted to him on racing.com but I can’t recall thinking so at the time. Maybe he showed more later in the parade. I Am A Star (race 6) was noddy and jumpy on my replay, so he must have calmed down later.