Racing: I Do did for Chittick family

Lisa Chittick's dad Dave O'Sullivan always coached we journos never to cheer a horse to the finish, writes Mike Dillon. Photo / Greg Bowker

Handy mare will tackle the big guns after scoring sentimental win in Foxbridge Plate.

Horse racing is a hard game with little room for the heart. Only on a strip of green they call a racetrack and in front of a piece of timber better known as a winning post.

Divorce those and you won't find a game in town that is more community minded and kind to those in need.

Witness Saturday's Lisa Chittick Foxbridge Plate that would have been too improbable even for a Hollywood movie script.

Ever wonder why jockeys joke and laugh in the jockeys' room, come out and knock each other down on the racetrack and go back inside and start joking?

Read the first three paragraphs.

When a virulent strain of leukaemia claimed Lisa Chittick's life this year, racing royalty in the form of the O'Sullivan family and the Chitticks lost a gem.

Lisa gave vibrancy a new meaning.

I Do's Lisa Chittick Foxbridge Plate win on Saturday took it to almost a different level again.

Great credit to Lisa's husband Mark Chittick, who arrived at the Te Rapa raceday office in a pre-celebratory mood despite what must have been in his heart. Post-race he said: "Now we are really celebrating."

Lisa would have approved.

I Do's trainer Allan Sharrock, no stranger himself to personal tragedy at a younger age, felt the immense pressure minutes before the jump.

I watched the race with Sharrock, who broke into an instant sweat when I Do slightly missed the jump and ended up three or four lengths further back than intended.

Lisa Chittick's dad Dave O'Sullivan always coached we journos never to cheer a horse to the finish.

I ended up standing next to Dave in the Randwick grandstand when the greatest horse he trained, Mr Tiz, came out of an impossible position to produce one of the finest performances imaginable and win Sydney's biggest sprint, The Galaxy.

A better cheer from a trainer I had not heard.

Not until Allan Sharrock's "C'mon girl" on Saturday. It would have woken the dead and who could blame him?

"Bit of pressure," said Sharrock in the greatest mouthful of racecourse understatement in a decade.

Sharrock and Mark Chittick race I Do. Chittick was as honest as you'd expect afterwards.

"I doubted she had the class for group one, but after that I think perhaps she has, so let's go to group one."

That means Hastings' Makfi on August 30 and Sharrock is all for it.

"She's got a bit more class than many think and she's not just a mudder. She can run 1400m in 1:22 and 1600m in 1:34."

Fate can often be amazing.

"I was meant to be overseas this week," said Chittick. "But something told me not to go."

You want to think that was Lisa.

*Two to follow: The winners of the last two Te Rapa races - El Pescado and Ponderosa Miss. Boy, they were smart on Saturday.