El Vencedor is now favourite to defend his title in the $1 million Bonecrusher NZ Stakes back at Ellerslie on March 8 and if he can win that he will do something very few horses in the modern era of New Zealand racing: win three domestic Group 1 races in four weeks.
It is a feat almost unheard of under New Zealand’s current racing system, with Melody Belle going close when she won the Hawkes Bay Triple Crown in 2019 but that was over five weeks while her stablemate Avantage won four Group 1s in a row in 2021 but never three of them in four weeks. Fayreform was another who went close, winning four Group 1s in five weeks in 1998.
Others like the magnificent Sunline won three Group 1s in a month in April 2000 but they were in Sydney and the way the New Zealand season is structured it is almost impossible to do here.
It is actually impossible for a two-year-old to do it, almost the same for a three-year-old and highly improbable for a sprinter purely because of the way their Group 1s are spaced.
The Herbie Dyke/Sport Nation Classic/Bonecrusher Stakes treble would usually be just as unlikely too as it means going from 2000m back to 1600m then back to 2000m in four weeks and until this year would have meant too much travel.
But El Vencedor is a horse in the zone.
A horse who likes racing on the speed, loves firm tracks and is enjoying so many of our weight-for-age races lacking genuine tempo so those who get back never get a chance to get to his tail, which is usually going pretty fast at the top of the straight.
To do great things horses still need desire and El Vencedor, this post-Christmas, fully fit version is machine-like, an equine Alpha male.
Winning the Bonecrusher is no gimme the way Orchestral was winding up late into third yesterday and she will be much harder to hold out up to 2000m on Champions Day.
But if El Vencedor can complete that treble it will make him our premier Group 1 galloper for the season before he heads to Hong Kong for the QEII Cup on April 27, a free throw at the stumps.
He will also be hot favourite for New Zealand Horse of the Year as his opponents run out of races good enough to attract votes.
It would be fitting if he could achieve it in a race named in honour of Bonecrusher as he is one of the only other NZ gallopers in modern racing history to win three Group 1s in a month, culminating in his epic 1986 Cox Plate.
But even he didn’t pull that off in just four weeks, his win in the first leg of that treble, the Underwood Stakes, coming of all things on a Thursday. Ocean Park achieved the same Underwood/Caulfield Stakes/Cox Plate treble in 2012 but for him it took five weeks.
So it takes a special warrior to do what El Vencedor is trying to do. To defy luck, his own body, tiredness and logic.
Any horse who could pull that off would deserve Horse off the Year.
Michael Guerin wrote his first nationally published racing articles while still in school and started writing about horse racing and the gambling industry for the Herald as a 20-year-old in 1990. He became the Herald’s Racing Editor in 1995 and covers the world’s biggest horse racing carnivals.
