Before we go any further, I need to make it very clear that I had nothing whatsoever to do with naming our daughter of Tavistock and the Volksraad mare Macinally. And I have to admit that I’m also on record as saying that if there were a competition for the worst named horse in the country, the TAB would be offering prohibitive odds on her success. That’s one of the few downsides of being a minority owner – the people with the biggest shares certainly have the biggest say in the choice of name. And that’s fair enough.
However, she’s certainly looking – if not sounding – an awful lot more attractive than she was six months ago. Her 3YO career featured a win over a weak maiden field at Whangarei followed by a couple of unimpressive efforts in R65 1600 events at the same venue. Hm, I said to myself, at least she’s a winner and she’s a Tavistock; recommending her to our racing partnership wasn’t the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever had.. But, as the Dee and Gee saga has instructed us, thoroughbreds can improve dramatically given that magic ingredient – time.
To be fair, the Logan-Gibbs training combination always had faith in her and that faith has been vindicated in RTT’s most recent two starts. Firstly, there was a facile first-up victory at Ruakaka when she was three wide all the way and then ran away from her R65 rivals over 1200. And then there was yesterday. She didn’t win easily but she fought to stave off several challenges in the last 100 metres. The 1200 distance now appears to be too short for her and I have hopes that her nomination for the $80,000 Dunstan event over 1500 on Boxing Day will prove to be realistic.
So much for names. It’s also worth commenting that two of the best named horses I’ve ever had anything to do with – Red Hot Pirate and Brief Encounter – have recently proved themselves to be entirely useless.
