Racing: O'Reilly Express on slow track to immortality?

Some horses just can't seem to win. That description is perhaps being a little unfair to O'Reilly Express, who finished third in Saturday's $35,000 Swap Contractors Te Aroha Cup as a maiden.

To give you an idea of what that means, the first three in the handicap in Saturday's race - Everbright, Young Centaur and Tinseltown (Young Centaur was scratched) - had earned among them $1,789,301.

O'Reilly Express hasn't been able to win a race in 41 starts.

The locally trained gelding has an extraordinary record: he now has five second placings and a remarkable 13 third placings on his scoresheet.

To be able to finish third in Saturday's Cup, beating home big-winning former Hong Kong stayer Everbright, makes it almost impossible to believe he won't soon win a maiden race, although only 21 of his 41 starts have actually been in straight maiden races.

O'Reilly Express' last maiden task was eight races back.

Racing from time to time comes up with horses who just don't seem able - or want - to win.

Some of them have become famous.

In Japan, Haru Urara had 113 races from 1998 and 2004 for zip.

She became a celebrity known as "makegumi no hoshi", "the shining star of losers everywhere", and her fans bought merchandise.

Australian mare Oureone went winless in her 124 starts between 1976 and 1983.

Knowing Australians, she probably also had a nickname, but unlike her Japanese counterpart, hers would be unprintable.

It's astonishing that you could go 124 races and not win one, because in Australia you keep going further inland with a horse that's struggling until eventually you come to a meeting where they're racing around oil drums.

When you can't win around the oil drums it's time to swat away the flies and head back to sanity.

In the United States, Zippy Chippy, who was exchanged for a Ford truck rather than bought, managed to win a couple of races: one against a minor league baseball player and the other against a harness horse that was given a start, but against thoroughbreds he missed out in all 100 starts.

He was eventually banned from his local upstate New York track Finger Lakes, which has never been considered for a Breeders Cup meet, after being declared "a danger to the betting public".

However, the wooden spoons belong to a pair of English thoroughbreds, Mister Chippendale and Rossa Prince, both of whom managed to lose a walkover - a one-horse race.

Rossa Prince bolted while being saddled and could not be caught in the allowable time and Mister Chippendale's rider forgot to weigh in.

Perhaps the horse that made the most lasting impression on an entire country was Drongo, who couldn't win a race in Australia in about 35 starts before being retired in the mid-1920s.

He was remembered to the extent that on his retirement his name entered Australian folklore as the nickname for slow, dim-witted humans.