Racing: Even owner's dream can end sadly when racing tests friendships

Colin Jillings is the modern-day author of many of horse racing's slick one-liners.

"If you want to test a friendship, race a horse with someone," the retired trainer always said. "And if you REALLY want to test it, race a good horse with that person."

Jillings must feel his words are justified after the public scrap the two owners of Sir Slick, trainer Graeme Nicholson and Barry Brown, are having about the future of the big winner.

And, like the rest of us, he's probably more than a little sad.

Horses don't win $1.8 million unless they are stunningly talented.

That's an owner's dream.

How sad is it that it has come down to Nicholson wanting to buy out Brown after such a magical ride.

Only a disagreement on what that 50 per cent share is worth has stopped progress on the sale.

It's an impossibility to put a price on a horse that's just turned 8 and has had 100 race starts, even if it's won $1.8 million.

Without wanting to make this more public than it already is, perhaps the half-owner who doesn't train the horse feels like most of us that things should have already come to a happy ending after such a magnificent career.

There have been better horses than Sir Slick in the past 20 years - the Sunlines stand supreme - but few who have tried so hard and for so long.

That's all you can ask of a racehorse, to give its best and give it continually. Sir Slick has done that for five seasons.

We've said it in this column a couple of times, there is only so much mileage in a horse's legs and joints when racing at the top level.

As tough as she was, Sunline had just 48 raceday starts. Sir Slick has already had 100.

They must have been the most sound racehorses born in the modern era.

How sad it would be if something now happened to Sir Slick during a race. That's often the eventuality.

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Longtime Auckland Racing Club secretary Bill Mackie died at the weekend, aged 92.

Bill Mackie was just the fourth secretary the ARC had in its first 100 years of operation, holding the post from 1954 to 1986. He operated alongside some of the most powerful administrators the ARC has known, the likes of Sir Woolf Fisher and Dr Alex McGregor Grant.

But Bill Mackie's greatest legacy is as author of the beautifully researched The Noble Breed, a history of the ARC, which he published

for the club's centenary in 1974.

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Winning the Jockey of the Year at last week's NZ Thoroughbred Racing annual awards was not the only call to attention for champion jockey and champion apprentice James McDonald. The Cambridge teenager also won Excellence for Sport at the Waipa District Youth Awards, which incorporates the Waikato district.

The competition included Michael Whiteford, New Zealand's under-19 national water ski champion and runner-up in the transtasman under-19 championship.

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Tough stayer Sculptor will get a second chance at the Melbourne Cup after being paid up as a late entry.

The Peter Mckenzie-trained 7-year-old hasn't raced since he finished ninth to Efficient in the 2007 Cup and joins the 230 horses nominated last week.