 | RACING HISTORY |
YEAR: 2011
FEATURE RACE COMMENT
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Lance Justice can look back on November as being bad but not awful. While the Inter-Dominion Pacing Grand Final is a loss in waiting, the Victorian trainer still left New Zealand and the Cup carnival with enough to be cheery about. Smoken Up followed his game New Zealand Cup second with a better effort to beat Franco Emirate in the Woodlands New Zealand Free-For-All, ending the gloomy possibility that he could have been placed but beaten in every Addington start.
Before the relief and happiness that brought, Justice had sent home the promising 3-year-old Mark Dennis and Discrimination, a lucky find in Southland. Discrimination could be the mirror image that Justice thought might happen but never would. He is an unraced 4-year-old gelding by Tinted Cloud and the tenth foal from the Vance Hanover mare, Disbar. The half-brother to big winner Disprove (11 wins) was bred by Michael House, and sold to Justice clients by Tony Barron, who qualified the horse in April.
"He reminds me of 'Trigger' in every way - his looks, his manner, the way he hangs; everything about him is so similar," said Justice. "He's going to win heaps of races. And he's four. You know you can't do anything with Tinted Clouds until they're that age."
After his free-for-all win over New Zealand's best except Terror To Love, Smoken Up is obviously still a long way off letting his star fade. "Now that he's nine, I thought it would only be a matter of time when he started on the downhill slide. I'm not sure he's ready for that yet," he said. "He was a totally different horse today than he was for the Cup. He had 18 hours in transit on his way here and he just stood there when I painted his feet on Cup morning. On Friday he was all over me, pushing and playing. And in the prelim I knew he wanted to be there - he never lets a horse go past him in the warm-up, and that's what he was like. He was just so much sharper."
Justice knows that great success and pleasure from it is not an everlasting condition. "I had a call from the owner of Sokyola a fortnight or so back wanting to know why I didn't take on the New Zealand Cup with the horse. Well, as we know, Sokyola was a Sydney horse and won two Miracle Miles. That was his race. And with Smoken Up, he's learn't to travel. It was not put to me all that lightly."
Credit: Mike Grainger writing in HRWeekly 16Nov2011