Racing: Now that's a Snazzy plan

At first it looked a crazy plan running Snazzy in Saturday's $100,000 Whakanui Stud International.

It just might turn out to be a stroke of genius.

Winning a group one race with a horse assessed at near the bottom of handicap races is slaughter. Next time Snazzy is handicapped it will be near the top, not the bottom, of the field.

Unless that race is the $600,000 Skycity Auckland Cup, for which the weights are already out.

Horses cannot be rehandicapped for a weight-for-age win once weights are released for a handicap.

Snazzy has just 51.5kg in the Auckland Cup on March 8.

After Saturday's victory chief handicapper Dean Nowell raised Snazzy's rating to 101, for which the three horses in the Auckland Cup are weighted at 54.5kg. Only three Cup horses have higher rating - Distinctly Secret, Viz Vitae and Kerry O'Reilly.

If Snazzy wins the Auckland Cup with just 51.5kg on his back you would have to say it is piece of remarkable placing by trainer Jeff Lynds. He might also be looking at dropping the horse back to 1600m for the Otaki Maori WFA at Otaki.

You wouldn't be quite sure what the plan is because Lynds is inherently shy about advising the press of projects for his horses, which is disappointing given the importance of futures betting to punters these days.

Most trainers are sensitive to that.

"We've got a couple of options," was all Lynds would say.

Perhaps it was significant that just before Snazzy won the Whakanui, the TAB laid a single bet of $500 on him for the Auckland Cup at $25.

Someone thinks the Ellerslie race is a goer.

The bet was timely - the moment Snazzy went across the finish line on Saturday the TAB slashed his Auckland Cup odds to $12.

It was a masterly Lisa Cropp ride that got Snazzy home. She had no pre-race plans to lead, but when the pace was slower than expected she let Snazzy slide around the front group.

Cropp had been watching closely during the earlier races and realised the strip three or four widths off the fence was the only place to be.

She didn't panic when Gavin McKeon slipped Pretorius up on her inside down the back straight, just as she didn't get into a flap when Tusker headed Snazzy in the home straight.

With that magical ability of hers to lift horses through the gears without bashing them with the whip Cropp steadily got Snazzy into overdrive and swept back past Tusker for a highly impressive win.

Grant Cooksley was adamant Tusker made it look better than it was because she knocked off work before the winning post.

Because of the strange way the race was run the form around the beaten runners is unlikely to be accurate - you can ignore most of it.

Well-fancied Bazelle, who seems to prefer right-handed racing, did not look comfortable. Her fifth, only 2.3 lengths from the winner, was better than it looked.

Similarly, Kerry O'Reilly, in finishing third, looked great from an Auckland Cup perspective and Atapi (4th) and Kind Return (6th) were not disgraced. Like most on the day, Kind Return struggled to make ground from last. That quartet and Pretorius will all be better suited at Ellerslie.