Let Me Thru is Chris Lang's main Australasian Trotters Championship contender in Sundons Gift's absence
Even in the absence of champion Nagambie squaregaiter Sundons Gift, this year's renewal of the SEW-Eurodrive Australasian Trotting Championship may be the most exciting of recent times.
As a 10-time Group 1 winner, Chris Lang's superstar son of Sundon can lay claim to being Australia's best performed trotter of all time and would have been the drawcard of the series that returns after a three-year hiatus.
But a measure of the Southern Hemisphere’s trotting depth is that the series that starts with heats at Ballarat this Saturday night and concludes with a $150,000 final at Tabcorp Park on February 5 remains strong even without Australian trotting’s only millionaire.
It was that depth that convinced master trainer Chris Lang to save the nine-year-old after he was handed a 20-metre handicap for the standing start series that is contested in years that the Inter Dominion Trotting Final isn’t run in Victoria.
“I don’t think he was unfairly handicapped, don’t get me wrong. On the conditions of the race he had to get a handicap and 20 metres was fair,” Lang said.
“But we had to sit down and say, ‘if we’re going to go there we want to be able to win (the heat) and we want to be able to win the final’. Can you give horses like Down Under Muscles, I Can Doosit, Let Me Thru and Ronerail 20 metres head-start and go around 13 other horses and still win the final?
“The way our trotters are these days, there is so much depth and they can run so quick, it was probably an impossibility from the word go. That was why we scratched him.”
Sundons Gift’s absence means none of the 23 horses engaged across Saturday night’s two $20,000 Group 3 heats face a handicap.
The opening 2710m heat, Race 4 at 8.30pm, shapes as a race in two with the Mark Purdon-trained I Can Doosit, a winner of last Saturday night’s Group 2 Cochran Cup, and boom five-year-old Down Under Muscles both to start off the front.
The Kiwi has the inside starting position with Chris Alford’s Down Under Muscles to start from barrier seven.
All the big names have also drawn the front in the second heat, at 9.30pm. The Kerryn Manning-trained Danny Cash has the pole, rejuvenated Ronerail is next door with Lang’s dual Breeders Crown winner Let Me Thru out in barrier six.
Let Me Thru is Lang’s main hope in Sundons Gift’s absence – he also has Miss Warbucks in heat two and Kyvalley Mac in the opening qualifier – and while he’s been happy with his two wins back from a spell, he recognises the five-year-old needs to rise to another level.
“He’s going good, but he’s going to have to be going very good to win,” the Nagambie horseman said.
