 | RACING HISTORY |
YEAR: 2003
FEATURE RACE COMMENT
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What a fine trainer of a trotter Paul Nairn is. And what better way to show it than run first and second in the Giannis Pita Bread Canterbury Park Trotting Cup, and judge the finish with such precision. Only a dead-heat between Call You Later and Bristle could have been closer.
Less than a week earlier, Nairn had won fresh-up at Motukarara on the grass with both of them. He was a little worried with the jump in class facing Bristle, but the stallion gave Nairn cause to forget them with his work during the week. "If anything, he has been working better than Call You Later," he said.
Nairn trained Call Me Now, the sire of Call You Later, to win the Cup. David Butt drove the horse when Nairn went through a stage when he wasn't driving much at all. "I started off driving Stan Boy and Wave Goodbye, but then I stopped for a while. If you train them, I think you should drive them when you can, but there is also a time when maybe you should step down," he said.
Like many stables, Nairn is well served by enthusiasts, in his case by his father Graham who makes the morning tea and Peter Willman who does everthing else. "Pete's been coming out for almost ten years. He is a wharfie and arrives at 6:45am every day; he drives the galloping pacemaker, does the yards, and fixes the gear. If it wasn't for people like that, who love horses and racing, it just wouldn't be so good," he said.
Credit: Mike Grainger writing in HRWeekly 8Oct03