Headline News;
Secondary Market shares for sale from deceased Estate – Sailing Away and Mohawk Brave
Fortuna launches new Breeding Syndicate – Matariki
Frankie Dettori to retire in 2023
Te Akau apprentices Joe Kamaruddin and Niranjan Parmar both attained awards at the recent Northern Apprentice Riders Awards
Jake Bayliss returns to NZ to ride
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Fortuna has two runners this week, one at Matamata, one at Otaki
PRINCE LONHRO makes his race day debut at Matamata 23rd Dec in the Maiden 1050m event – Race 7 at 4.14 pm. This handsome 3yo son of Lonhro has had 4 trials for a 3rd and 3 wins – has taken time to mature but now ready to unleash – will be hard to hold out here
MOHAWK BRAVE races in the R74 1400 at Otaki on Boxing Day – race 5 at 2.52 pm – this talented galloper who won three of his first four starts as a 3yo and ran 4th in the Group One Levin Classic in the Autumn, was a certainty beaten at Hastings 7th Dec when hampered in the run home – represents a strong each way chance here
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Fortuna Track work – Matamata
Tuesday 12th December
No timed Fortuna trackwork today
Fortuna Track work – Singapore
No timed Singapore trackwork this week
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Other News
Secondary Market shares for sale from deceased Estate – Sailing Away and Mohawk Brave
Fortuna stalwart, Iain Fletcher, passed away during the year – Iain had been a long time Fortuna client and had shares in nine horses at the time of his passing. His estate has decided to sell those shares, and most of them have been snapped up by fellow syndicate members in each syndicate, but there are a couple of parcels left over which can now be offered to the wider audience.
SAILING AWAY is a 2yo Gelding by the emerging sire, Merchant Navy and out of the Galileo mare, Anchovy, a ¾ sister to Champion European 3yo of 2013, Ruler Of The World – this is a very strong pedigree page. Acquired by Fortuna at the 2022 Karaka Book One Sale, “Salty” as he is nicknamed, initially appealed as a 2yo type, but during the Spring, he went through a real growth spurt and so is in the paddock now until end of December. He has also been gelded and this has assisted in his physical development. He has had 3 trials for a 2nd at Te Rapa in August and two unplaced performances during October and November – these leading to his gelding and current paddock spell. Syndicated initially for $110k all up, there is 2.5% available at $750 total and $100 per month from 1 January. This 2.5% can be divided up if necessary.
Here is his pedigree page
MOHAWK BRAVE is a 4yo by Australia’s most expensive Stallion, Extreme Choice, out of the USA Stakes winning racemare, Bens Duchess. Acquired by Fortuna as a 2yo from an Inglis Digital Sale, he won three of his first four starts as a 3yo in NZ and ran 4th in the Group One Levin Stakes at Trentham in March (a race won by Imperatriz). Then spelled, he ran a solid 4th on resuming at Taupo, before failing at Ruakaka on a shifty track, then finished mid field at Matamata in October off a wide draw and was a certainty beaten when 3rd at Hastings 7th December, when held up for racing room in the run home. Runs Boxing Day at Otaki R75 1400m
$3,000 for the 5% share total and $200 per month from 1 Jan and the 5% can be split into 1% parcels.
See the pedigree below and if shares are acquired before Boxing Day race then he will be racing in the amended ownership
Contact John by email response to this update if you wish to be involved in either of these two opportunities
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Fortuna launches new Breeding Syndicate – Matariki
This is our second breeding syndicate – the first one being the Secret Spice Breeding Syndicate which got cracking in 2019 and to date has gone pretty well to plan with Secret Spice foaling down a filly to Xtravagant in 2021 and this Filly will be offered for sale at the Inglis Classic sale in Sydney in February. She has since foaled again to Xtravagant in 2022, this time a Colt and is now in foal to Heroic Valour.
Matariki is a 2yo Filly we bought as a yearling at the 2022, Karaka yearling sale and formed a racing syndicate with her. Unfortunately, she suffered a severe paddock accident in the middle of this year, severely damaging a hind leg – she has been carefully nursed back to health and although a racing career has been ruled out for her, there is absolutely no reason why she cannot be a Broodmare and so that is her future. Some of her existing syndicate members have decided to become part of the new breeding syndicate and so now we are offering additional shares to others who may wish to join.
Matariki is a lovely Grey Filly by Reliable Man out of the Encosta de Lago Mare, Conferre, a 4 time winner in Australia at distances between 1400m and 2400m – so possesses a really nice staying pedigree which would match well with any number of suitable stallions here in NZ.
MATARIKI
Currently agisting in the Waikato, the plan for Mataraki would be to mate her in the spring of 2023 with Stallion choice not being made until May/June of 2023 in order to give us time to assist the market adequately.
Here is her Pedigree Page
Matariki has been transferred for zero consideration to the breeding syndicate and shares are available down to 1% with an initial working capital sum (in total) of $3000 being raised and ongoing payments for each one percent from the 1st of January at $25 per month.
So, a 10% share is $300 initial and $250 pm from 1 Jan, a 5% share $150 initial and $125 pm from 1 Jan, a 2.5% share $75 initial and $62.50 pm from 1 Jan and a 1% share $30 initial and $25 pm from 1 Jan
Click HERE to read the Disclosure Statement
Shares can be ordered off the Fortuna website at the link HERE
Contact John direct by email response to this Update if you need more infomation
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Frankie Dettori to retire in 2023
Article by Steve Dennis of Thoroughbred Racing Commentary
Frankie Dettori shocked the racing world by saying he intends to retire after at the end of 2023 after a ‘farewell tour’. In this brilliant appreciation of an iconic global talent, Steve Dennis charts the ups and downs of a high-profile career
Frankie Dettori
Never is a small word with big connotations, but perhaps there has never been another jockey quite like Frankie Dettori, 52, who has just announced that he will call time on the most glorious, most lapidary of careers at the end of 2023. There have been many more prolific jockeys, and plenty of riders who have won more major races, and a good many who have been considered his superior. But no-one else has managed the blend of sheer brilliance on the track and high celebrity off the track that has characterised Dettori’s time among us.
He was born in a well-known city in northern Italy but, in the words of the song, he has always been too sexy for Milan. Dettori has been box-office famous, a showman like no other, racing’s laughing, grinning, buoyant cavalier even when – like all the best entertainers – he was dealing with the darkness of his demons.
Racing – all sport – is at heart a numbers game, so let’s take the abacus down from the shelf and set the beads whirring. Dettori rode his first winner at Turin racecourse in November 1986, and has barely let up the pace ever since. He has ridden 3,336 winners in Britain, placing him fifth in the all-time list behind Sir Gordon Richards, Pat Eddery, Lester Piggott and Willie Carson, and hundreds more around the world.
Royal Ascot hero: Dettori records the most recent of his 77 victories at Britain’s most prestigious race meeting on Inspiral in the G1 Coronation Stakes in June. Photo: Francesca Altoft/focusonracing.com
He has ridden 21 British Classic winners – Piggott’s record is 30 – and 282 G1 winners, which includes 14 at the Breeders’ Cup. There have been 77 victories at Royal Ascot, three British jockeys’ championships and one apprentice title, seven wins from seven rides on one indelible day at Ascot, a record six wins in the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, four in the Dubai World Cup, three in the Japan Cup, two in the Derby, and for good measure he also bred a winner of the Queen Mother Champion Chase at the Cheltenham Festival.
Public property
The names of the great horses he as partnered are legion. Pick six, perhaps – Dubai Millennium, Daylami, Sakhee, Enable, Stradivarius, Lammtarra – and you leave out many champions and countless household names, and all this untrammelled excelsior of success has come while he has been public property, usually willingly but occasionally unwillingly, the going rate for celebrity in the 21st century. When he rides off into the sunset for the final time, no-one will ever be able to say, “Frankie, we hardly knew ya”
Pedigree is the linchpin of Flat racing, and Dettori was bred to be both a jockey and the centre of attention at the big show – his father Gianfranco was 13-time champion jockey in Italy and his mother Iris Maria was a trapeze artist who also stood on horses’ backs as they cantered around the circus ring. This apple fell right next to the tree.
Dettori’s life and career resembles a sine wave, every up followed rapidly by a down, swiftly followed by an up. He moved to Britain in 1985 and won the apprentice – ‘bugboy’, for a US audience – title four years later, but shot to a prominence he has never relinquished at the age of 19, when winning his first two G1s within the space of 45 minutes at Ascot in September 1990.
In those days press conferences were not the polished, banal affairs they are today. All the journalists crammed into a small room in the bowels of Ascot’s old grandstand and Dettori climbed onto a wooden chair and held forth, running his hands through his impossibly luxurious mop of hair and beaming like, well, like a 19-year-old who had just begun the conquering of the world. We hacks were enchanted, entranced. We knew he’d go far. We never believed he’d go this far.
Unflinching self-awareness
But what goes up on to the rickety wooden chair must come down flat on its face on the floor, and like so many before him and afterwards Dettori soon fell under the wheels of fame’s relentless bandwagon. In a recent and highly confessional interview for the
Big Issue, a British publication, Dettori was unflinching in his self-awareness.
“By the time I was 22 I had turned into a dickhead,” he said. “I lost it, completely lost it. I loved the bright lights, loved the party and loved the drugs. I loved the women. I loved the entourage. I just completely f***ing lost”
Flying dismount: Frankie Dettori performs his trademark leap out of the saddle after winning the G1 Racing Post Trophy on subsequent Derby winner Authorized at Newbury in 2006. Photo: Dan Abraham/focusonracing.com
He was arrested for using cocaine in 1993, and received a police caution. He had been riding for the Queen, and it takes little imagination to conjure up the headlines. His career trajectory wobbled, dipped. Up and down, then up again. The following year he was champion for the first time, retained his crown 12 months later, and then in September 1996 he attained his absolute zenith when he rode all seven winners – the fabled ‘Magnificent Seven’ – on a hugely prestigious day at Ascot, his spiritual racecourse. The importance of that heavenly septet of winners is crucial to the Dettori legend. It made him, forever, defining him as a person as well as a jockey.
After his final victory aboard Fujiyama Crest – who Dettori would later purchase and bless with a life-of-Riley retirement – he performed his flying dismount (stolen from Angel Cordero, who stole it from Avelino Gomez, who may or may not have initiated it) and ran madly around the winner’s enclosure spraying the crowd with champagne, as if they weren’t intoxicated enough by what had just taken place.
Before that day, Dettori was admired and loved by the racing public. After that, he was untouchable, beyond the normal vagaries of affection. Frankie was Frankie, bigger than racing itself. He opened a chain of pizza restaurants, he was a team captain on a TV sports quiz show, he was to the apocryphal man in the street the only embodiment of a sport that had lacked a public figure since the very, very, very different Piggott had retired.
Global phenomenon
It was the beginning of the Godolphin years, during which Dettori became not just a British phenomenon but a global one. Yet his life, like the course of true love, never ran completely smoothly. Up/down/up. In 2000 his light aeroplane crashed in Newmarket, killing the pilot. Dettori was saved from death only by the bravery of fellow jockey and passenger Ray Cochrane, who dragged him from the wreckage, and the mental scars took years to heal.
In 2007 he won the Derby for the first time; in 2012 he fell from grace at Godolphin, losing his retainer, and was banned for six months after testing positive for cocaine when riding in France. He was 42. Surely that was ‘game over’. It looked that way the following year when he participated in the trashy TV show Celebrity Big Brother; Marlon Brando in the jungle, a mighty titan going terribly wrong in plain sight. That year he rode just 16 winners. Yet … two years later he won a second Derby on Golden Horn, escaping like Houdini from the chains of his flaws and failings and returning to his position as the brightest light in racing’s firmament, going on to enjoy a remarkably fruitful second coming as stable jockey to John Gosden.
Immortal sporting career
More than anything else, Dettori is a survivor, a rubber ball of a man who has always bounced back. He has made it through, coming out the other side of a remarkable and immortal sporting career with his talent and his position in the public’s affection largely intact. He rides much less often nowadays, saving himself for the big occasions, and although there has been the inevitable diminishing that comes with age – the reflexes possibly not what they were, the trackcraft less instinctive than before – he is still one of the best jockeys in world.
On top of the world: Frankie Dettori on Country Grammer, aboard whom he landed his fourth Dubai World Cup triumph in March 2022. Photo: Dubai Racing Club
Now for the last and long goodbye, a year that will be spent picking cherries from the fruit bowl of the racing world, every milestone – the last time in Dubai, the last Derby, Royal Ascot, Arc, Champions Day, Breeders’ Cup – cherished and slightly overwrought with emotion on his way to the end of the racing road. He will start the journey at sunny Santa Anita this month and finish it there at the Breeders’ Cup next November, arguably the greatest international jockey we’ve ever seen bestriding the globe one last time.
British racing will miss him terribly. Dettori is literally irreplaceable, as despite the obvious talent of William Buick, Oisin Murphy, Hollie Doyle and all the rest there is no-one with the public profile, no-one with the wider connection, no-one with that irrepressible blend of glamour and genius that has characterised Dettori from almost the very start. British racing is practically at its lowest ebb anyway, and a Dettori-less future is – although completely predictable – another worrying augury for the coming years.
He has said that he has no wish to be a trainer. Not enough spotlight, not the right temperament. Dettori’s future lies in the media, as a racing pundit, as a television personality, a star of stage and screen a little like a modern-day Tod ‘Yankee Doodle’ Sloan, box-office to the end, prime-time funtime Frankie.
“I’ve had an absolutely amazing career and loved every second of it,” he told interviewer Lee Mottershead of the Racing Post. “But you have to know when to let go, and I want to stop at the top.”
Up, down, up, down, up. He’s timed it perfectly. The great entertainer leaves the stage, leaving us wanting more, knowing there’ll never be
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Te Akau apprentices Joe Kamaruddin and Niranjan Parmar both attained awards at the recent Northern Apprentice Awards Evening
Click HERE to read the full story from the Te Akau website – both Joe and Niranjan rode several winners for Fortuna during the 2022 Calendar Year
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Jake Bayliss returns to NZ to ride
Readers may recall the spectacular success that Australian hoop Jake Bayliss had as a much younger rider in the 2018/19 period – since those days, Jake continued his riding career in Australia and over the last 12 months, with a very successful stint in Singapore, where he rode a lot of winners for Donna Logan, including success on the Fortuna Gelding,
ROCKY.
Jake Bayliss in action aboard ROCKY when winning at Kranji August 2022
His return to NZ is welcome and he joins the ranks of a number of “new” riders in NZ, such as
Warren Kennedy, Craig Zackey, Joe Doyle and Hakim Kamaruddin, all of whom have added much needed depth to the riding ranks here
See story below and note that Jake has his first day of riding in NZ today at Matamata where he has secured a number of rides.
Bayliss hungry for more NZ success
Source
NZ Racing Desk
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A familiar Australian face has re-joined the New Zealand riding ranks with the arrival this week of multiple Group One-winning jockey Jake Bayliss. He will kick off his third stint in New Zealand at Matamata on Friday with the 28-year-old coming off a rewarding 12-month contract in Singapore. Bayliss last rode in New Zealand in the 2018/19 season.
“New Zealand has always been really good to me as far as support goes and I’ve made a lot of nice friends and I’m really looking forward to it and getting on some nice horses,” Bayliss said. “Since I left, I feel like I have grown up and matured a lot from the young boy I was and more of an established rider now. I learned a lot riding in Queensland and in Singapore and have a lot more to bring to the table now.”
Bayliss would have been back here sooner but for attending to a family matter. “I’ve always wanted to get back to New Zealand, but unfortunately I had to look after the family farm back in Australia when my grandfather fell ill,” he said. “I stayed put in Queensland and Singapore was on the radar as well but everything was put on hold so I stayed there to ride. Once that settled down, I thought I’ll follow my dream and go up to Singapore and I was very lucky and grateful to get a 12-month licence.”
Bayliss made the most of his opportunities and exceeded all his expectations with 19 winners and multiple feature race victories. “I pretty much ticked off every goal and won a (Singapore) Group One there, the Queen Elizabeth (1800m), and the Group Two Three-Year-Old Classic (1400m) so I definitely achieved more there than was on my list of goals,” he said.
Jake Bayliss
Bayliss enjoyed a close association with expatriate Kiwi horsewoman Donna Logan in Singapore and sought her advice about a New Zealand return and also received encouragement from another senior Te Akau identity.
“It was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to come back to New Zealand again,” he said. “I was riding for Donna in Singapore and asked her for her thoughts and she gave me a bit of a push to give Mark Walker a call as well and he was very supportive. “After the Singapore season was wrapped up I went back to Queensland for two weeks to be with the family and an early Christmas and arrived here on Tuesday afternoon.”
Bayliss has again joined forces with riding agent Stu Laing after giving him a heads up about his return to New Zealand.
“I gave Stu a call while I was in Singapore to let him know it was on the radar and he thought it was a great idea and gave him the confirmation a week later,” he said. “We had a very good partnership the last time I was here with good success and I’m really hoping to kick off the same way we left off. I rode a bit for Fortuna Racing when I was In Singapore so I am looking forward to renewing my association with John Galvin and his big team of Owners as well”
The lightweight Bayliss will be in action at Matamata and the focus will then turn to the premier meeting at Pukekohe on Boxing Day. “I was pretty harsh on myself and rode 52.5kg in Singapore and over here I think I’ll stick to 53kg, but if any opportunity came up for a nice ride at 52.5kg by all means it would get done,” he said. “The long-term goal for next year is to hopefully follow a few New Zealand horses over to the Brisbane carnival where home is and my next move after that is up in the air, I think I’ll just go with the flow.”
In the meantime, Bayliss is also hungry to add to his tally of prestige victories in New Zealand following his past success aboard the Graham Richardson and Gavin Parker-trained Volpe Veloce in the 2018 Gr.1 Railway (1200m). During his second stint the following year, he won the Gr.1 Herbie Dyke Stakes (2000m) with On The Rocks for Michael Moroney and Pam Gerard and the Gr.1 New Zealand Thoroughbred Breeders’ Stakes (1600m) on Nicoletta for Murray Baker and Andrew Forsman.
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Finally, Jessica and I and family wish all our Fortuna clients and other subscribers to this update, a very Merry Christmas and may Fortuna (i.e the Roman God of good luck and good fortune) smile upon you greatly in 2023, particularly with your runners and any punting exploits you may pursue