Gold Circle Pty (Ltd)

Today's Racing :

Birthday Girl ready to celebrate

BRENDAN PATHER
The first month of a new season usually sees the larger Cape-based stables taking a break from the normal cycle, for various reasons, and the yards with smaller strings play a more prominent role than usual during this period. One of the standout yards during the first month of the current season has been Riaan van Reenen’s Phillipi-based operation.
Van Reenen has a moderate-sized string in comparison to most of his Cape-based counterparts but his yard has made the best of this early period with five wins and two seconds from 17 runners sent out this term. The five wins include a Grade 3 success in the Final Fling Stakes in the first week of the new season and it’s worth respecting their runners at all levels during this period.
The Van Reenen-yard sends out 8 runners in contesting four races at Kenilworth tomorrow. Although none of them stand out as a banker in their respective races there could be some value about one of them in particular.
Birthday Girl, a five-year-old Model Man mare, takes on 15 other fillies and mares in the sixth, a MR 68 Handicap run over a mile and one of the toughest races on the card.
Van Reenen acquired the mare as a maiden at the beginning of last season from the Joey Ramsden yard.
New environment
The new environment seemed to suit Birthday Girl as she broke out of the maiden ranks a month later. But she subsequently struggled to be competitive in handicaps off a rating of 67 although never finishing far off the winner.
She has since dropped nine points in the ratings and her last start at this track, when just failing to last over 1800m from a wide draw, suggested that Birthday Girl is now racing off a winning mark. She failed to fire over the final two furlongs in her last two starts, both over 2 000m at Durbanville, and the drop back to a mile looks ideal.
The blinkers were removed for her last start and she seemed more relaxed in running, moving up purposefully at the top of straight before going backwards when asked the question at the 400m marker.
Birthday Girl should be racing fit having had three runs since June and has the advantage of an inside draw tomorrow.
More significantly, Birthday Girl seems to prefer racing up with the pace and apprentice Nevin Marday should be in a good position turning for home to take full advantage of his 4kg weight allowance.
Considering the overall competitiveness of the race, her last two below par runs and the apprentice on board, Birthday Girl is likely to open at generous odds. If so, she would be worth a solid each way bet.
It would be advisable to include a few others in Pick 6 permutations, most notably the in-form Forest Child and the improving Barberton Daisy.
But in a race where few seem
to enjoy racing up with the pace, this could pan out perfectly for Birthday Girl.

\| All information on these pages are (©) Copyright Gold Circle Pty (Ltd) 2002 \| site map
(This site is best viewed at 1024 X 768)