Racing: An almost perfect champion

To consistently beat the best makes a horse great. To consistently beat champions makes you one of them.

To beat champions the way Bonnie's Chance did defies logic.

The amazing pacing mare finally lost the one battle none of us can win on Tuesday, being humanely put down at the age of 31.

The fact she lived well past 100 in human terms, annually defying the southern winters, will not surprise anybody who saw her race.

Because in an era of champions, Bonnie's Chance was the queen of pacing.

I don't write those words lightly because she raced at a time when giants ruled at racetracks.

It was the early 1980s and Delightful Lady, Armalight and Hands Down towered over the trotting (as harness racing was commonly called then) landscape.

They were the Kiwis charged with defending our pacing pride against two freakish Australians, Poplar Alm and Gammalite - the hare and the tortoise of Australasian racing.

Those horses became legends through staggering staying performances but there was one enemy they failed to subdue.

Her name was Bonnie's Chance.

The South Canterbury mare showed promise as a youngster but developed into a superstar after joining the stable of the then young gun trainer Richard Brosnan.

The pair swept through the harness racing landscape, smashing records and denting reputations. No horse was safe.

Bonnie's Chance first started on Hands Down, the Canterbury freight train whose stamina was usually no match for Bonnie's speed.

A few brief meetings with an aging Delightful Lady made for classic inter-island clashes before Bonnie started the war of her life - a two-year running battle with Armalight. And they were running fast.

Armalight was an equine version of Flo Jo, she looked like a man and raced accordingly.

But that didn't stop Bonnie's Chance routinely thrashing her.

The most lopsided of their contests came in the 1982 New Zealand Cup when Armalight entered the Addington home straight well ahead of Bonnie's Chance and finished second, seven lengths behind.

"When you race horses like Armalight the best you can hope for is to beat them by clawing your way past them," said Brosnan this week.

"But when you blow past her like that, to win the cup by seven lengths, that is something you never forget."

The only reason Brosnan was not as stunned as the rest of the racing world was because he knew something we did not - that sunny day in November was maybe the only time in her career Bonnie's Chance was not sore.

"She was spot on that day, the best I ever had her. But really she was never 100 per cent sound. She had arthritis her entire career.

"She was so bad that when she started her preliminary I'd often wait for the stipes to call us back in because she was obviously sore.

"But every time the same thing happened. She would nod her way to the top of the straight at the start of her prelim and then when we turned around to start her warm-up she would grit her teeth and go.

"It was like she said to herself, 'It's racenight, let's not worry about the pain until tomorrow'.

"But it makes you wonder what she could have done had she ever been sound."

That cross was always harder to bear over 3200m or at the end of a hard Interdominion series. But when it was bearable, Bonnie was unbeatable.

It meant she was at her most potent over a mile, when she had less time to feel the searing pain in her knees.

Which brings us to one of the most staggering statistics in modern New Zealand harness racing: Bonnie's Chance once won 13 mile races in a row. Among them was a 1:56.2 win over Hands Down at Washdyke. At the time it equalled Lord Module's national record set at Addington.

Looking back now one can only wonder what she would have been able to achieve in North America with its all-mile racing and helpful drug laws.

Under those circumstances she may have been the best mare in the world.

Instead her international competition was limited to all too infrequent meetings with Gammalite and Poplar Alm.

Gammalite just beat her in an Auckland Cup but on the whole she was too fast for him. But it is her crushing of Poplar Alm which rates among her more unbelievable displays.

It was the 1983 Interdominions at Alexandra Park and Poplar Alm was rated the greatest pacer in Australasia, a machine who many Australians still call the best they have seen.

In the second round of heats he was sitting parked when Brosnan, in what would now seem an out of character move, moved up to attack.

"I didn't expect to get the parked position off him because this was Poplar Alm after all, so I was surprised when I did.

"Then I was sitting there waiting for him to come off our back and go swoosh."

Brosnan is still waiting because Poplar Alm was made to look like a battler as Bonnie's Chance put lengths between herself and the champion.

It is a race Australian racing men still like to dismiss, simply being too bizarre for them to comprehend.

If Bonnie's Chance had a fault that was it, the ease with which she did the seemingly impossible.

She didn't have to fight like Hands Down, or be whipped as hard as Gammalite. She didn't experience the lows among the peaks of Armalight or have the quote-spurting trainer that Poplar Alm did.

She simply turned up, gritted her teeth, and beat the best of the best more often that they beat her.

She was almost perfect.

Apart from that arthritis she was perfectly mannered, had a great attitude. She never did anything wrong so she never had to overcome any big dramas.

If she had been blessed with good legs she may have been considered the greatest standardbred mare ever bred here. Even without them she was a champion.

The one who thrashed other champions.


Death of a champion

Bonnie's Chance
* Breeding: Majestic Chance-Bonnie Countess.
* Foaled: September 22, 1975.
* Trainer/driver: Richard Brosnan.
* Record: 75 starts, 32 wins, 16 placings. $357,000/
* Wins: New Zealand Cup, New Zealand Free-For-All, Pan Am Mile, NZ Breeders Stakes.