Rising 10-year-old Intransigent with his spoils after trainer Kirsty Lawrence retired him at her stables in Pukurau.
Rising 10-year-old Intransigent with his spoils after trainer Kirsty Lawrence retired him at her stables in Pukurau.
When she was a little girl Kirsty Lawrence fondly recalls pressing her face up against the mesh wire fencing from outside the Hawke's Bay Racecourse in Hastings to watch races.
"My grandmother used to live in Gascoigne St, just past the 400m mark of the course on race days so, ironically, now I'm on the other side of the fence as a trainer. It's pretty amazing," says Lawrence who as a youngster used to run around the track with the family dog, frantically waving a fly swat pretending to be thoroughbred stallion Balmerino who was inducted into the New Zealand Racing Hall of Fame in 2008. He died in 1996.
This month the Bay trainer closed a chapter on a rising 10-year-old, Intransignet, retiring the gelding who reeled in the biggest win of her career to her stable in Waipukurau.
It came just before tomorrow's $75,000 Fast Track Insurance HB Gold Cup, which Intransigent won under Lawrence's tutelage in 2014.
Conspicuous in its absence in the listed race are Bay-bred or trained horses in the field of 12, something she perceives to be an indication that "it's a pretty even field without a standout" in the staying ranks.
Lawrence believes the Murray Baker and Andrew Forsman-trained Saint Emilion as a favourite based on last Saturday's victory although she does fancy the chances of the Stephen Autridge and Jamie Richards-trained Silverdale.
"All the good horses get sold to Australia," she says, stressing she broke Who Shot the Barman who now races across the ditch as a classic example.
Consequently Lawrence has a scripted answer for those people who tend to corner her about her screaming in the background of the TV footage when Intransignet won the HB Gold Cup.
"I tell them, 'If you had $75,000 in a bag hurtling towards you then you'd be screaming as well'."
The son of Pentire mare Risible and Refuse To Bend won 11 races, raking in $330,000 in stakes for major shareholders Lawrence and her husband Steve, and co-owners Brendon and Barbara Ray, of the Bay, Barry Sizer, of Waipukurau, and Brian and Annette Hawkins.
"He's only little, just over a pony. Nobody wanted a little brown horse in the paddock," she says of Intransigent who had a start for Kevin Myers but was eclipsed in the shadow of owner/breeder John Clapham's then exceptional 2-year-old, Cellarmaster, who at the time was going tit-for-tat the John Bary-trained with champion stallion Jimmy Choux.
In just his fourth start for Lawrence, Intransigent won in Wellington for jockey David Walsh who quipped: "What's this rabbit."
Walsh went on to ride the gelding, "who was very kind and very easy to train", to six victories. Lawrence recalls how the horse that weighed 437kg when wet wasn't expected to win the 2014 Group 3 HB Gold Cup on $15 long odds.
Instransigent trainer Kirsty Lawrence with strapper Kushla Edgarton after winning the Windsor Park Hawkes Bay Gold Cup in 2014. Photo / Warren Buckland
"You can't beat heart. He had an incredible will to win. He was very good on wet tracks," she says but revealing paradoxically as the horse got older he didn't fancy winter, thus the retirement. In racing there's a saying, 'Weight stops trains', so it was the same for Intransigent."
He kept his minders and punters guessing. Slow out of the gates, he had a tendency to kick in 10 to 12 lengths out to victory but on four occasions he did that jumping out first.
"He's an enigma but has personality," says Lawrence, likening him to the bloke in the corner office who is close to becoming a relic but whose wicked sense of humour colleagues will miss once he's gone.
However, what resonates most with the trainer when Intransigent crops up is his three-peat of the Kiwifruit Cup in Tauranga from 2013 to 2015.
Walsh rode him for the first one, apprentice Kei Chiong the second and Kane Smith the third.
"I'll be an old lady in a chair when someone will repeat that feat," she says, revealing that Chiong, who won four races last weekend in her country, became the first licensed female jockey in Hong Kong.
The manner in which the jockeys rode Intransigent over the finish line had a Groundhog Day feel about it.
"He would drop outside, come up on the inside, come around [horse] John Gray, go back into the rail and win," she says, recalling trying to drum the script into Chiong whose command of English wasn't very good in those days.
Among other black-type victories for Intransigent were the $80,000 Taumarunui Gold Cup in 2014 and the Rotorua Cup.
A week before the third Kiwifruit Cup victory, the horse was out hunting with a beagle pack (collective term of hunting hounds) in the Bay with Helen and Chris Hansen.
The gelding has a pride of presence in Lawrence's stable of 11 unnamed and unraced horses.
"He'll be hunting in Waipuk and be part of the feed up and all that but he won't be part of the day-to-day routine with the others," she says, keeping her finger crossed some day she'll find a successor that reflects his attributes.
The HB Gold Cup, Lawrence says, hasn't been engraved for a few years and she's been giving "Butch" (HB Racing general manager Andrew Castles) a hard time about making sure Intransigent is on it.
"It's pretty cool, actually. I can tick that off my list," says the trainer of a horse that made 80 starts, 60 of them in Open handicaps.
