In a last-gasp hope for July success, trainer Candice Bass-Robinson submitted her Grade 1 winner Trip Of Fortune for the Hollywoodbets Durban July on Tuesday, 13 June, in the final round of supplementary entries.
Due to Trip Of Fortune’s high merit rating, he will come in at top weight, and this does throw a spanner in the works for those horses who were hanging on by a thread, especially for a horse like Jimmy Don. After Gavin Lerena won the last race on Sunday, he commented saying that Jimmy Don’s run was a prep run for the big day however it doesn’t look like it might be that cut and dry, and the panel will now have a unanimous task in picking the 18 horses and two reserves for the Durban July 2023.
Whichever way the panel goes, we can expect a field of the highest quality to grace the turf on 1 July, and the debates from pundits and experts will continue. Will it be a 3-year-old or 4-year-old, or maybe even an older horse?
The Durban July theme is out of this world and promises to be an out-of-this-world race. See It Again looks to lead the 3- year-old category after his emphatic win in the Daily News 2000, and for any other 3-year-old to beat him, he will require the other horses in his age category to improve because he had them stone cold in his last outing against them.
However, the Durban July has the potential to be an extremely messy race, and gaps may be hard to come by if you are too far back, the horse which ran ahead of him last time out, Dave The King, has the potential to improve even further especially if he continues his front running tactics in the Durban July.
Dave The King’s stable companion, Safe Passage, the horse which came third in the Durban July last year, will have an international flavour about himself this year as he gets Belgian jockey Christophe Soumillon aboard.
The 4-year-olds have different stories about them; two standouts, namely Winchester Mansions and Pacaya, have recently hit peak form. However, they will all have to hope that horses like Safe Passage and Pomp And Power don’t find their best form because they might be hard to peg back if they do.
The addition of Trip Of Fortune makes him the joker of the pack, especially with him being a Grade 1 winner; the question mark is, does he get the trip? He has never been above 1600m in his entire career.
Opinion: In all honestly, this year’s four-year-olds were not “that good 3-year-olds” and See It Again does look a class above the rest, but I feel, as it stands, that he might leave himself too much to do so with over two weeks to go I am in the corner of Dave The King!
Written by: TheSportsCaster
Image: 4Racing
