 | RACING HISTORY |
YEAR: 2001
FEATURE RACE COMMENT
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Angela Jane? First. Young Rufus? First also. Jack Cade? He won. Dependable? Yep, him too.
The hardest time to win a race at Addington is on Cup Day, but Mark Purdon made it look easy when he saluted the judge four times with members of his team. Excluding the Cup, Canterbury's adopted son was the star of the show. And while hard to single out any one performance it was the run of Young Rufus in the $25,000 Firestone Firehawk TZ100 Pace that left most people shaking their heads in disbelief.
Never seeing the fence at any stage during his race, Young Rufus was three-wide with-out cover throughout and even had the cheek to change gear and skip clear turning for home. This minor free-for-all on Cup Day has often been a stepping stone to stardom for some great pacers, and in recent years the likes of Iraklis and Yulestar have both won it and then come out the following season and won the New Zealand Cup.
Knowing only too well that Young Rufus was getting mentioned in the same sentence as some Town Hall company, Purdon had no hesitation saying that he expected him to go on to bigger and brighter things. "He is a great horse. You can just put him in the race at any stage. There is a bit of class about him," he said.
On the programme for Young Rufus this season are the major 4-year-old events, and next year's Inter-Dominions. It is only 12 months since this horse got beaten narrowly in the Sires' Stakes Final by Franco Heir, and just look at him now. "His main problem as a 3-year-old was steering problems," Purdon said. "I put a pole on his off-side and he used to run away from it, so we had to take it off. It is back on again now, without a pricker, and because he has matured a bit he seems fine with it."
Credit: John Robinson writing in HRWeekly 15Nov01