RACING Challen To Return At Pakuranga Hunt

Press, Volume C, Issue 29599, 23 August 1961, Page 4

RACING Challen To Return At Pakuranga Hunt

Challen, the best of the three-year-old fillies last season, will begin her four-year-old racing in the Admiralty Handicap at the Pakuranga Hunt meeting on Saturday. She began her three-year-old racing a year ago by winning this race narrowly from Firenze. No-one will be very surprised if she is up to the task of winning again, this time with 9-10.

The return to the racing scene of Challen and others which distinguished themselves in three and two-year-old classics last season will put fresh interest jnto Saturday’s racing. The top ’chasers will have one of their final major tests for the year in the Pakuranga Hunt Cup, and after that it will be spring racing in earnest. If she has made normal progress with age, Challen should have some good opportunities to improve a wonderfully consistent record in the next few weeks. Oaks Double As well as being the best of the three-year-old fillies last season—she won the New Zealand-Great Northern Oaks double and the Gold Trail Stakes—she beat the males in the Hawke’s Bay Guineas and ran Stipulate to a head in the Great Northern Derby. It was little wonder, then, that Challen was rated next best to Bargoed, Blue Lodge, and Stipulate, <in the Free Handicap for tsree-year-olds, compiled for the season by Mr L. P. McMaoemin.

Bargoed, Blue Lodge, and Stipulate were each given 9-0, They are row in Australia preparing for important spring races, and their absence must take something

away from the quality of New Zealand spring racing, especially weight-forage races. In the absence of the good colts, Challen’s spring prospects must brighten considerably. She may not be top-class weig!ht-for-age material, but she is renowned for her consistency and gameness, qualities that could help her to win one or more of the big handicap races in the next few weeks. St. Leger Winner Dashing Star, runaway winner of the Great Northern St. Leger last autumn, will be one of Challen’s rivals in the Admiralty Handicap on Saturday. Mainly on that win, Dashing Star was ranked equally with Challen in the Free Handicap. But it was apparent that

this Te Aroha filly needs the ground at least easy before she can make her mark against the best of her age. The ground was easy when she won the Great Northern St. Leger by six lengths. And it was also easy when she ran Stipulate close in the Gloaming Stakes at Trentham last January. Challen and Dashing Star will both be tested on Saturday by a filly that showed smart form as a two-year-old last season. This is Mali, a Gabador filly trained by K. J. Heaton for Mr Woolf Fisher. She was only once worse than fourth in nine starts in her first season, and won two races, one being the Fitzherbert Handicap at Trentham.

Mali was given 8-11, 91b less than the top weights Oabriere and Commanding, in the Free Handicap for two-year-olds.