The End of a Perfect Day

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 136, 30 August 1927, Page 10

The End of a Perfect Day

GENUINE GENUINELY LEFT Punters are a meek lot. Cheerfully they murder their money on horses which have no chance because either the animal, the jockey, or the owner isn’t ready to do his best. That’s all in the game, they say. But for cold-blooded butchery of cash, the “start” of the second division of the Kogarah Stakes in New South Wales recently, will take some beating. Deliberately, the starter left one of the best backed horses in the race. Genuine, a Valais with the Valais’ temperament was solidly backed. The horse was rather unruly at the barrier, but times without number worse behaved animals have been treated with consideration. BANG GOES THOUSANDS But. after a few minutes’ delay the starter apparently lost patience—at the instant lie lost patience punters lost thousands of pounds—he pulled the lever, and with Genuine at least ten lengths behind the field, the rest hopped away. Yet the grandstands are still standing at Moorefield, not a picket of the fjnees has been disturbed, and the starter is still sound in wind and limb. There is no doubt that punters are a passive lot. Troubles never come singly for trainer Danny Lewis. In the morning one of his charges, Pedestal, by Valais out of Fallingbrook, who won a juvenile at Warwick Farm in great style, broke a leg on the track and had to be destroyed. So Genuine’s fate was merely the end of a perfect day.