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BLAST FROM THE PAST

INVICTA

INVICTA

As a student with duties I missed the 1961 NZ Cup. My first question as I hopped on the Lincoln bus home was, "Who won the Cup?" Bus drivers knew a lot about racing in those days. I was told, with disbelief on both sided, that it had bee Invicta. Invicta? How did that happen?

Happen it had. Given the run of the race by Steve Edge one of the younger trainers to have won a Cup, the old horse, an eleven-year-old, held out the unlucky Patchwork in a desperate finish. Nothing approaching that age has won the Cup since. As became known, Edge had employed staff especially to walk Invicta up to five hours a day on the roads through the winter of that year but could still give him only two lead up starts, unplaced runs in the Flying Stakes and the Hannon Memorial. So it was no surprise he paid 19 pounds to win. In spite of his chronically bad legs, Invicta managed to make the post in the 1962 Cup but the magic was long gone.

The irony was that but for a racing scandal Invicta may have been Cecil Devine's unprecedented fourth successive Cup winner. When Devine and Jack Litten were given six months over the 'whip incident'(suspensions were what they meant in those days) Devine dispersed several of his racing team. Invicta then going through the grades was won of them. Owner Les Duff gave the horse to his son-in-law Edge who was then training a small team at Rakaia. Edge also later trained a star in Light Lord from the same family as Invicta for the Duff family.

Ironically Percy Watson whose Purple Patch breed was then one of the most famous in the country, gave Lady Belmer to Devine to prepare for the Cup but she broke early and ran exceptionally well for sixth. Two years earlier her driver Maurice Holmes had been tipped from the cart in the race. Watson's other runner in 1961 was Patchwork. One man's luck in racing is inevitably another man's poison.

Credit: David McCarthy writing in Harnessed Feb 2016