AS OUTSTANDING HORSES GO MONASHEE IS ONE, PRECIOUS COMMODITY
Posted: October 11, 2007
Vancouver, B.C. (Oct. 11/07) – Sports fans pay big bucks to watch the very best athletes perform their crafts. The price of a ticket will be no object when Sydney Crosby comes to Vancouver for the first time as a member of the Pittsburgh Penguins next month. And BC Place Stadium will be busting at its Teflon seams when, eventually, David Beckham makes his first-ever soccer visit to Vancouver.
Hastings Racecourse has its marquee athletes, too, in the form of 1,000-pound horses like the 5-year-old gray mare Monashee, winner of 10 consecutive western Canadian stakes races and destined for further international stardom in the months and years ahead.
But unlike other sports entertainment properties, thoroughbred racing at Hastings swings its gates open to the public without any admission fee and Saturday afternoon in the $125,000 Ballerina Breeders’ Cup the great Monashee continues her quest to put together the best record ever compiled by a filly or mare based in British Columbia. It will be history in the making.
Monashee goes into the Ballerina with career totals of 16 wins from 21 starts with $631,330 in earnings.
Not too shabby when you consider local owner and breeder Ole Nielsen paid $14,000 for her as a yearling at the 2003 Keeneland September Sale.
Racing under the stable name Canmor Farms, Nielsen credits trainer Tracy McCarthy and her husband – retired superstar jockey Chris Loseth – for Monashee’s success. “Tracy’s patience with her has really paid off,” Nielsen says. “Monashee is not an easy horse to keep happy and it seems Tracy is the only one able to do it.”
Loseth, who retired in 2005 as the all-time leading rider at Hastings, rode Monashee for her first five races and is currently her exercise rider. Under regular jockey Dave Wilson, Monashee has become such a dominant force that it’s been difficult to line up horses willing to race against her. The Vancouver Sun Stakes last July had to be cancelled when just two other horses entered.
Only three horses will be challenging Monashee in Saturday’s Ballerina, where there will be “win wagering only”, a rare development that is a credit to Monashee’s overwhelming success. There will be exactor and triactor wagering in a field that includes Slewpast, Lady Raj and Selita’s Dream trying to upstage Monashee.
A confident but humble Nielsen says he might first send Monashee to Woodbine in Toronto for the $175,000 Maple Leaf Stakes on Nov. 10 before sending her to Southern California this winter.
“We’ve kept her at Hastings because this is where we live and we want to play the game here,” Nielsen told the Daily Racing Form’s Randy Goulding. “It’s been a great ride.”
It’s expected to get even greater in Saturday’s $125,000 Ballerina Breeders’ Cup.
The $100,000 BC Premier’s Handicap goes Sunday with Bob Cheema’s True Metropolitan favoured to cap another banner season under trainer Terry Jordan. True Metropolitan won the Premier’s and Sir Winston Churchill at Hastings last year and clinched a Sovereign Award with a win in the Grade 3 Woodbine Slots Cup.
Racing starts Saturday and Sunday at 1:25 p.m.
