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Trapeze Artist wows, Harlem trots in

Jockey Dwayne Dunn on Harlem. (AAP Image/Mal Fairclough)
Expert
24th September, 2017
15

The two main feature races at each of Rosehill and Caulfield had little comparable about them pre-race.

At Rosehill we had the Golden Rose, a set weights Group 1 over 1400m for three-year-olds that had a raging favourite, with a lucrative stud career beckoning for the winner.

At Caulfield was the Naturalism, a Group 3 Quality over 2000m for the open age stayers, all with their eyes on a Caulfield Cup berth, and it was an open betting race to boot.

The post-race similarities were that both had completely dominant winners at big odds.

In Sydney, Trapeze Artist wasn’t the despised outsider, but he wasn’t far from it, with only four horses longer than him in the betting.

Of course, such a starting price has never worried the horse, given that his three wins have come at odds of $20, $31 and $41. As much as $91 was available on the official flucs on Saturday too.

Yet, Trapeze Artist has never run a bad race, usually in high grade events, and somehow continues to slip under everyone’s guard. Not any more.

He won his maiden on debut, which is never easy to do. The Black Opal in Canberra is always a handy race, which he won with authority beating the well regarded Trekking.

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Trapeze Artist then finished his two-year-old season with good runs in the big Group 1s, sixth in the Golden Slipper and third in the Sires Produce, beaten a length and a half.

First up this campaign, he battled honourably carrying between five and eight kilos more than the rest of the field and was less than three lengths off other Golden Rose opposition Dracarys and Gold Standard after not having an easy time during the race.

In the Stan Fox last start he probably one-batted a bit, arguably the plainest run of his career, but he was still far from disgraced. It was the run that led him to be forgotten on Saturday.

The old adage is that you should always forgive a good horse a poor run, and there is no doubt now that Trapeze Artist is a good horse. It just took us all a while to come around. The way he put the Golden Rose away from the 200m when it looked like anyone’s race won’t be forgotten for a while.

Jameka won the Naturalism by 3.8 lengths in 2016 before romping away with the Caulfield Cup by three lengths a month later.

Harlem took out the Naturalism by 3.25 lengths on Saturday, thumping some genuine staying prospects in doing so, which makes him a serious Cups player this spring. This is especially so given the best of his overseas form was over 2400m before he came under the care of Team Hayes.

We saw the evidence of this over last 200m and 400m of the race, when Harlem was at his strongest while his opposition was tiring. If the race had gone any further, Harlem would only have widened the gap on all his rivals, with the possible exception of Amelie’s Star, who recorded great sectionals from the tail of the field.

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The question for David Hayes now is whether Harlem has a bridging run with four weeks to go before the Caulfield Cup, but he has always liked his stayers on the fresh side in the more European style, so the likelihood is that he will go in without another run.

Based on what we saw on Saturday, Harlem will be very hard to beat. But, like Trapeze Artist in the Golden Rose, he might just get forgotten, with more recent winners front of mind for punters.

The beauty of racing is that the game is never as predictable as the odds suggest. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.

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