Allan Sharrock has only one part of his Wellington Cup plan still to pull off — winning Saturday’s $300,000 feature at Trentham.
Sharrock is one of New Zealand’s shrewdest trainers, his strike rate consistently hovering around five, which some trainers can pull off for a season or two but few do consistently.
He has three representatives in the 3200m Group 3 and they aren’t the type of horses who embellish that strike rate because another one of Sharrock’s skills has been getting horses like them to the Cup with the right weight to win, which often means starting them in races they can’t win.
“Some of the stayers can’t win races short of a certain distance anyway, but for a horse like Waisake he has also been racing himself back into fitness,” Sharrock says of the 2021 Cup winner.
His plan starting the spring was to get progressive stayer Ladies Man into the Cup with 53kg, letting him hit his peak once the weights were released, and getting Waisake sound and healthy after a leg issue last year, but fit enough to win another Cup.