Millwood Nike named New Zealand Harness Horse of the Year

Champion pacing filly Millwood Nike.

Champion pacing filly Millwood Nike has entered the elitist of clubs by winning the New Zealand Harness Horse of the Year.

The unbeaten filly was crowned harness racing’s newest superstar at the annual awards in Christchurch on Monday night, the industry using the lull day between three days of yearling sales to bring its biggest names together.

Millwood Nike beat out the established open class pacing stars Akuta, Copy That and Self Assured as well as the resurgent Oscar Bonavena, who won Trotter of the Year, for the premier award.

She becomes only the fourth three-year-old filly to win the award, after Bonnie Frost (1970), Elect To Live (2002) and Carabella (2011).

While her cause was helped by the older horses dividing up their spoils so there was no definitive champion among their ranks, even if there had been that horse would have needed to have a very special year to beat Millwood Nike.

She won all nine of her starts, following on from eight straight as a two-year-old, to make it 17 unbeaten races.

Cruelly she was denied the icing on her cake in the NZ Oaks when she broke down the week of the race in December and she is now undergoing rehab for trainers Mark and Nathan Purdon.

Her three Group 1s during the season were the Northern Oaks, the Sires’ Stakes and the Nevele R Fillies Final, the latter the most dramatic.

She sat three wide for much of the race after starting from the outside of the second line yet blew her opponents away by six lengths in one of the greatest performances ever by a three-year-old pacing filly in this part of the world.

Millwood Nike also won Pacer of the Year as well while Self Assured pipped Copy That for the glamour Older Male Pacer of the Year title.

Oscar Bonavena’s incredible run of victories in the second half of the season saw him secure the most unlikely Trotter of the Year title a season after he won just one race.

Other awards winners were:

PACING

2-y-os: Filly, Coastal Babe; Male, Chase A Dream.

3-y-os: Filly, Millwood Nike; Male, Merlin.

4-y-os: Mare, Lady Of The Light; Male, Akuta.

5-y-o and older: Mare, Manhattan; Male, Self Assured.

TROTTING

2-y-os: Filly, Empire City; Male, Tyron Eros.

3-y-os: Filly, Sunnys Sister; Male, Lovemeto.

4-y-os: Mare, Double Delight, Male, Mystic Max.

5-y-o and older: Mare, Resolve; Male, Oscar Bonavena.

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.