Tuesday, 1 May 2012: Super mare More Joyous can be rated one of the best of an illustrious band of females to have won the Doncaster Handicap, Australia's greatest mile race, since it was first run in 1866.
 | More Joyous wins the Doncaster
Photo by Racing and Sports | |
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Earlier female winners have included Sunline twice, Skating, Emancipation, Maybe Mahal, Analie, Citius, Sarcherie, Cuddle, Valicare and Wakeful.
Her victory also made More Joyous the closest inbred female to annex the Doncaster since 1900, sharing the pattern with two males, Gold Rod (1939) and Hyman (1909).
Each of them is inbred 3x3 to an influential sire.
In the case of
More Joyous 
, she has a major American source Halo (Hail to Reason) as the paternal grandsire of her sire More Than Ready and as the maternal grandsire of her dam through his illustrious son Sunday Silence.
Gold Rod, a winner of the Breeders' Plate, AJC Sires' Produce Stakes, AJC St Leger, Hobartville Stakes, Epsom Handicap, Tattersall's Chelmsford Stakes, Hill Stakes twice, VRC Sires' Produce Stakes and Caulfield Futurity Stakes, was by Chief Ruler (The Tetrarch) from Oreum, one of the very few mares by their imported sub fertile Irish Derby winner King John.
Both The Tetrarch and King John were by Roi Herode, a good staying handicapper. The Tetrarch was his main claim to notability.
Winner in1909 of the Doncaster in the autumn and then the Epsom in the spring, Hyman was inbred 3x3 to Carbine's sire Musket.
Hyman was by Havoc, a VRC Australian Cup and AJC Plate winner by Musket's AJC and VRC Derby winner Nordenfeldt, and from a mare by the Musket sire Thunderbolt.
More Joyous added another record to her honour board when she followed up her Doncaster victory seven days later with a cavalier win in the $500,000 Queen Elizabeth Stakes over 2000m at Randwick.
It is the first time the double has been achieved in the same year since the Queen Elizabeth was established in 1954.
Grand Armee, a Hennessy gelding trained by Gai Waterhouse won the Doncaster in 2003, finished second in it in 2004 and took out the Queen Elizabeth that year and again in 2005.
The Queen Elizabeth was the third G1 win in a month for More Joyous and her eighth overall. Her record now reads 26 starts,19 wins (18 stakes), two thirds and $4,254,650.
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