Wednesday, 23 July 2008: David Hayes will be double handed in Saturday's $60,000 Listed Dermody Stakes at Cheltenham in a bid to end his finest season since returning to Australia in style.
The Dermody Stakes is the final Black Type race on the Australian racing calendar for the 2007-08 racing season and is restricted to two and three-year-olds at set weights.
Hayes, who has claimed the Adelaide and Melbourne premierships this season to reassert himself as the most dominant trainer in Australia, is chasing a Dermody double after winning last year's sprint with Lisson Grove.
His entries for this year's edition are the classy three-year-olds
Shrewd Rhythm 
and
Distinctive Lass .
Paul Gatt, the number one rider in Adelaide for the Hayes stable, will ride Shrewd Rhythm.
The Danehill Dancer colt was placed in the G1
Blue Diamond Stakes as a 2YO and won the Vain Stakes at Caulfield first-up last spring.
He hasn't started since he finished eighth in the G2 Yallambee Classic at Morphettville in March.
Distinctive Lass will be having her fist start in Adelaide since her debut third at Morphettville in November of 2006.
She has since raced in Victoria, NSW and Queensland and returns on the back of three successive wins in Victoria at Ballarat and Sandown twice.
The Dermody could be pivotal to the Adelaide riding premiership battle between Chad Lever and Clare Lindop with the pair locked together on 49 wins going into the final meeting of the season.
Lever will ride the Gary Kennewell-trained three-year-old filly Tevez while Lindop is expected to take the mount on the Leon Macdonald-trained speedster Victory Chant.
Amy Herrmann, Adelaide's champion apprentice, will ride Li'l Cashy for her master David Balfour in the Dermody Stakes.
In a rare year the race has failed to attract any two-year-old entries.
