Brent Thomson signs on for another year

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34099, 11 March 1976, Page 8

Brent Thomson signs on for another year

The successful horseman, Brent Thomson, will end his apprenticeship on Saturday, but is to sign on again with his father, the Wanganui trainer Keith Thomson. Thomson is not IS until St Patrick’s Day, and has elected to sign on for another year. For one of his age Thomson has a record of success that would take beating anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere. He rode his 180th winner earlier this week, three years after his first victory, at Waipukurau on An Illusion. In his first year of race riding Thomson brought home 47 winners, even after being out of action for eight weeks through injury. He added 69 in the

year ending March, 1975, but the last few months have been the most memorable of all. This season he has won the Southern Hemisphere’s richest weight-for-age race, the Cox Plate, on Fury’s Order, and the Auckland Cup on Perhaps.

Other notable victories on the Thomson record include a Wellington Adams Mile on An Illusion, the Wellington Guineas on Jealous Lover, the Desert Gold Stakes on Persuasian, the Benson and Hedges Inter-Island on Fury’s Order, the Great Northern Foal Stakes on Mop, the North Island Challenge Stakes on Jocasta, and the Whyte Handicap on Fair Warning. Thomson now has high hopes of breaking Noe! Harris’s record of 210 wins as an apprentice. While Wanganui will be his home base for the next year Thomson will probably capitalise on his skills by moving further afield later.

He impressed many hard-headed, slow-to-praise Australians for his handling of Fury’s Order in the Cox Plate at Moonee Valley last spring. “There would be a fortune for one of his weight and skill if he decided to settle in Melbourne,” Jack Elliott, chief racing writer of the “Herald,” Melbourne, remarked after he saw Thomson win the Cox Plate on Fury’s Order.