Higgins meets cup winner again

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32847, 22 February 1972, Page 9

Higgins meets cup winner again

(From Our Own Reporter) HAMILTON. Unabashedly the gifted Melbourne jockey, R. Higgins, admits that Light Fingers was one of the great romances of his life. “Even my wife was jealous of her,” Higgins said before he won the Melbourne Cup on the Waikato-bred daughter of Le Filou.

Today Higgins will have his first race ride in New Zealand in the International Stakes at Te Rapa. He arrived from Melbourne on Sunday and yesterday all his plans for the day revolved around a visit to the Pironga farm of Mr V. F. Dawson where Light Fingers has thrived since the end of her illustrious racing career.

"She was a racehorse.” That form of tribute from a jockey with the brilliant record and international background of Higgins raises Light Fingers to a high place in the short list of the “greats” to have raced in Australia in the last 30 years.

“She was never really at peak fitness for her two Melbourne Cups, but she won one and carried 9-0 or so into second behind a horse like Galilee in the other,” Higgins recalled yesterday. Higgins was one of the earliest arrivals on the tracks on a drizzly, grey morning at Te Rapa yesterday and before long he was getting to know Game, his mount in today’s $15,000 feature race.

Higgins was resigning himself to riding the brilliant Hastings black in striding work on one of the inside tracks but he had no objections when Game’s Hastings trainer, K. H. Quinlivan, settled for a couple of rounds at a trot of one of the car parks.

"The way that fellow felt this morning I was pleased we were in the car park and not out on the track,” Higgins said yesterday. While Higgins was in the Te Awamutu district yesterday the Queensland jockey, C. O’Neill, was visiting the famous Trelawney Stud near Cambridge. “I’ve never ridden a bet-

ter horse than Prince Medes, and I could not pass over the chance to see his sire, Alcimedes,” O’Neill said yesterday. O’Neill, who comes from Brisbane, will ride Kirrama in the Invitation Stakes today. The successful Sydney jockey, N. Voigt, seized on the chance to ride Silver Knight, the 1971 Melbourne Cup winner, when he attended the tracks yesterday. “I rode a well-beaten Sydney horse behind Silver Knight at Flemington. Now I can go home and say I’ve ridden a Melbourne cup winner,” Voigt said yesterday. Today however, Voigt’s race ride will be the Te Rapatrained Suttle, which he rode on one of the inside grasses yesterday. Voigt has shown more eagerness than any other visitor to ride in other races at Te Rapa today but he has made plans to return to Auckland before the end of the programme for a connecting flight with Sydney for

racing at Canterbury tomorrow.

I On the other hand Higgins, who does not plan to ride in any other race but the International, will be content with an unhurried trip home on Wednesday afternoon so that he can ride trackwork on Thursday, , Higgins rode three winners at Flemington last Saturday, and none of his wins gave him greater pleasure than the win of Hampton’s Pride,

The colt that brought $60,000, the record price in the history of the National Yearling Sales at Trentham, was at one time being written off as a racing proposition because of the effects of a virus that affected his throat, but now he has emerged, by winning three races from five starts, as one of the most promising three-year-olds in Australia.

“I’m not going to say he is good enough yet to rate up to a good horse like Classic Mission, but Hampton’s Pride is still improving and must continue to do well,” Higgins said yesterday.