Dennis Drier clinched the 2000th winner of his career when the three-year-old Silvano gelding Hard Core passed the post first on debut in the first race at Greyville on Sunday and by the end of the day the maestro Summerveld-based trainer had treble cause for celebration.
Two nights earlier he had been crowned the KZN Champion trainer for the umpteenth time and the treble he landed at Sunday’s meeting put an end to a relatively dry spell.
Dennis Drier (Nkosi Hlophe)
Drier started out as assistant trainer to his late-great Uncle Syd Laird in the late 1960s and took out his own license in August 1977.
He had been associated with many great horses while with Laird and learnt a lot about preparing horses for big races.
He won the country’s biggest race, the Durban July, with Spanish Galliard in 1992 and at around the same time was training the good sprinter Polished Silver and the classy sprint-miler Spook And Diesel. Polished Silver won seven races, including the 1992 Grade 1 Computaform Sprint. In 1990 Spook And Diesel gave Drier the first of his wins in a race he was to later dominate, the Grade 1 Gold Medallion, which is a race for two-year-olds over 1200m run at Scottsville’s big Festival Of Speed Meeting.
Like a fine wine, Drier has had the best spell of his career this decade. He has won at least 17 Grade 1 races from 2010 onward.
He has won six of the last nine runnings of the Gold Medallion and has also trained two great fillies this decade.
Val De Ra, a sprinter, won eleven of her thirteen starts and her three Grade 1 wins included both the Computaform Sprint and the Cape Flying Championships on weight for age terms against the boys. Beach Beauty was a miler to middle distance filly who despite her tiny stature won five Grade 1s and she never let punters down on the numerous occasions in which she was regarded as “the meeting banker.”
Drier won his ninth Scottsville Grade 1 this decade and his tenth overall when Sommerlied won the SA Fillies Sprint in May this year and she was named KZN Champion Sprinter and Champion Older Female.
In his speech on Friday night Drier owed a lot of his success to the owners who support him, the stalwart team of people around him at Summerveld and to his wife Jill, who is the daughter of the trainer John Breval and is a fine horsewoman in her own right.
By David Thiselton
