Slipper Winner Back In Action
The Age
Friday December 5, 2008
IF SOMEONE asked you to name the former Golden Slipper winner racing at Caulfield tomorrow, you might take a little time working out which horse they were talking about.
The Golden Slipper winner is called Asylum Seeker and if that name does not sound familiar, don't worry because the group 1 Golden Slipper this mare won was in South Africa in July 2006.The five-year-old mare is now trained by Peter Moody and will be having her first Australian start in race seven at Caulfield. But her trainer is not overly confident of striking early with the talented mare. "She seems a nice mare but she's been off the scene for a long while so she'll take some time and might not be at her best until the autumn," Moody said.The mare, who was bought by Australian owners to breed with after racing just 11 times in South Africa, did not immediately acclimatise to Australian conditions, which explains why she has not raced since February 2007.Asylum Seeker, by British sire Count Dubois, ran second in a recent Cranbourne barrier trial and goes into tomorrow's race just one kilogram above the minimum after the three-kilogram claim for Ibrahim Gundogdu.MENDING HIS WAYS?BENALLA trainer Timothy Grace is hoping the adage of "one man's poison is another man's medicine" rings true for his five-year-old galloper Philistine.Philistine, who lines up tomorrow at Caulfield in the final race, has had about six trainers and has thrown off even more jockeys in the three years since he began his racing career, but Grace said yesterday that he believed he had turned the former rogue around."I've been told that he can match it with group 1 horses if you can ever get him right and I think I've got him spot-on at the moment," Grace said. "We put blinkers on him in a recent (Benalla) trial and he won by six lengths so we thought we'd throw him in the deep end on Saturday and see what happens."Grace, a former jockey and foreman who worked with Stylish Century when he was nosed out of the Cox Plate in 1989, bought Philistine for $5000 at the Oaklands sales earlier this year.
© 2008 The Age
