NSW: Relaxed lifestyle the secret to Nat's success
By Tim Egan, March 31, 2020 - 9:47 AM

Rowing champion turned horse trainer Natalie Jarvis achieved a career best when she led in four winners at the Sapphire Coast last Friday.
The quartet took Jarvis’s tally for the season to 20, putting her well on target to beat her previous season best of 26, which she achieved last season.
Jarvis attributes much of her success to the decision she and husband/stablehand Luke made to leave Kembla Grange and purchase stables at Moruya.
“It’s a great place to train,” she said this week.
“Each horse has its own yard where it can spend time in the sun each day. There are riding trails we can access and beaches where we can swim them.
‘At trackwork of a morning there are usually only a couple of horses working at any given time.
“All of these things combine to make for a very relaxing environment for the horses, which helps keep them mentally and physically fit.”
Jarvis’s Sapphire Coast winners were Boom And Zoom ($1.80 favourite) in a maiden, Instruments ($19) and Heavenly Thunder ($9) in benchmark 58s and Airfree ($9.50) in a benchmark 66.
Kayla Nisbet took the riding honours, booting home a winning treble including two of Jarvis’s winners.
Cup stunner
Another up-and-coming stable took out last Friday’s major prize in NSW, with Petrology ($51) taking the $150,000 Muswellbrook Cup (1500m) for young Newcastle trainer Nathan Doyle and jockey Ashley Morgan.
The eight-year-old caused a boilover in recording a dominant 3½-length win over Love Shack Baby with Bobby Dee third.
Petrology was coming off a second-up sixth on the Kensington track and had won just five of 60 starts going into last Friday.
The Fastnet Rock gelding began his career with the Hayes/Dabernig team at Lindsay Park and had five starts with Matthew Dunn at Murwillumbah before transferring to Doyle last spring.
The Muswellbrook Cup was his first win since a 1600-metre handicap at Moonee Valley in June 2017.
The $73,000 Skellatar Sprint (1000m) saw the Brett Cavanough-trained Star Boy ($11) lead all the way under Ben Looker.
Trophies triumph
The other feature at Muswellbrook last Friday, the $50,000 Wayne Harris Handicap (1280m), was won by Trophies Galore ($7.50), trained locally by Andrew Robinson and ridden by veteran hoop Darryl McLellan.
The race is named after one of the district’s favourite sons, former champion apprentice and one of the finest jockeys of his day, Wayne Harris.
Harris was born in Muswellbrook in 1960. At age 15 he became apprenticed to local trainer Pat Farrell. As an apprentice, he rode in three successive Golden Slippers, becoming the first junior to win the race when he rode the Bart Cummings-trained filly Century Miss to victory in 1979.
He became the first apprentice to ride five winners on a program at a metropolitan Sydney meeting, achieving that feat at Randwick on December 30, 1979.
Harris rode 558 winners as an apprentice, setting a record in the 1980-81 season with 183.
In 1994 he rode the David Hayes-trained import Jeune to victory in the Melbourne Cup.
In a career spanning two decades, during which he rode with success not just in Australia but overseas, Harris rode more than 2000 winners.
Sadly, illness and injury forced him into premature retirement but he still maintains an active involvement in racing through media work for Sky Racing.
All eyes on Narromine
An ordinary meeting at Narromine, 40 kilometres west of Dubbo, took centre stage for punters all over Australia last Thursday, when it became the only thoroughbred race meeting in Australia after other meetings were cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The TAB announced that turnover for the meeting was up 180 per cent compared to the previous year.
With the future of racing uncertain due to the health threats and travel restrictions posed by the virus, trainer Nathan Doyle warned of the effect the virus would have on the industry as more and more businesses are forced to close, creating greater unemployment.
“People need to put food on the table for their families first. The training bill is the last one they’ll pay so trainers will lose money,” he said.
Show must go on
For now at least the racing continues and this Saturday will see the running of the Country Championship Final (1400m) at Randwick.
For many country racing participants this race rates as the Melbourne Cup of country racing, even if this year’s prizemoney has been reduced to $400,000 by coronavirus-related cost-cutting.
Sixteen horses from around the state — two from each of the seven country regions plus two from the Wild Card Qualifier — will face the starter in what should prove a very competitive race.
On Sunday all eyes turn to Wellington, at the junction of the Macquarie and Bell rivers, for the Showcase meeting featuring the Wellington Cup (1700m), Wellington Boot (1100m) and Town Plate (1100m).
Déjà vu
Speaking of The Championships, last Saturday’s all-important Provincial Championship Qualifier at Wyong needed to be switched to Newcastle on Tuesday when heavy rain forced the stewards to abandon the Wyong meeting after race seven due to poor visibility.
The qualifier was to be the final race on the eight-race program, and this was the second time in a fortnight that a qualifier had to be postponed.
On March 14, the qualifier at Gosford had to be rescheduled after that meeting too had to be abandoned due to heavy rain, with just one race remaining — the Provincial Qualifier.
One might have thought that officials could learn from this experience and moved the qualifier forward on the Wyong program — if not prior to Saturday, even on the day itself.
As one veteran trainer commented: “There was a time when the main race on any program was run at about race five or six. I don’t know why they’re now being put back to last.
“It doesn’t affect me — I haven’t got a horse in it — but it will affect the preparations of some of the horses because they’re now going to have to have a race closer to the Final than had been planned and some horses mightn’t back up as well as others.”

 

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