With the current season barely past halfway the race for the various titles are wide open. Anthony Delpech leads the Jockey’s Championship with latest National Horseracing Authority figures having him four ahead of former champion Andrew Fortune. Delpech leads with 121 winners from Fortune’s 117.
Delpech has recently split from the Mike de Kock yard as retained rider and although he will still take mounts for the stable his is now a free agent and can keep his nose in front.
Anthony Delpech
Close behind are S’Manga Khumalo on 113 and Muzi Yeni just cracking the century mark. Anton Marcus has the highest strike rate of all riders with 24% of his rides making it to the winner’s enclosure but he tends to cherry-pick his mounts and he has ridden 85 winners from his 342 mounts. Delpech is close behind on 23%, his 121 winners coming from 555 rides.
Fortune, Khumalo and Yeni have all had over 700 rides, Fortune topping the list with 784 mounts. These three have also adopted a policy of ‘have saddle will travel’.
Current champion Gavin Lerena is a winner behind Marcus on 84 for the season but on Sunday left to continue his career in Hong Kong where he has landed a contract as Club Jockey to the Hong Kong Jockey Club so will not be defending his title.
On the training front the race for the title looks a three-way contest between Justin Snaith, current champion Sean Tarry and Mike Bass, multiple Western Cape Champion but yet to win a national title.
Snaith is 30 winners ahead of Tarry but the title is based on stakes won. Snaith 133 winners have garnered R11,574 million with Tarry’s 103 winner’s having earned R11,276 million. Bass is only R500 00 behind Snaith, his earnings coming from just 65 winners but with a high percentage of placed runners.
With stakes from restricted races also counted, Glen Puller finds himself in fourth spot on the log with R8 992 million from just eight winners courtesy of Illuminator’s victory in the CTS Million Dollar last month.
Tarry would appear to hold the whip-hand at this stage of the season with the lucrative Highveld autumn season pending and a stable loaded with potential. Snaith will not have many runners on the Highveld and will likely concentrate his energies in preparing his string for the South African Champions Season that starts in KZN in May and continues for three months to the end of the season.
The retirement of Futura will have removed one string from Snaith’s feature race bow but quadruple Grade 1 winner Legislate is to race in Durban before retiring to stud at the end of the season. The Rising Sun Gold Challenge, which he won last year, is a possible objective.
Ryan Munger, Craig Zackey and Callan Murray are spate by a single winner in the apprentice log with Munger on 32 winners and Zackey and Murry on 31 each. However, Munger and Zackey came out of their time at the end of January.
By Andrew Harrison
