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Three Big Targets For Variety Club

3 minute read

South African champion Variety Club is expected to have a maximum of only three more races in the UK, America and Hong Kong before he is retired to stud.

Variety Club
Variety Club Picture: various (provided)

The dual Horse of the Year was given a month’s break after his triumph in the Champions Mile in Hong Kong and is now at Newmarket in the UK with Mike de Kock being prepared for the G1 Prix de la Foret at Longchamp on Arc day on October 5.

Derek Brugman, racing manager for owner Markus Jooste, said: “After that he goes for the Breeders’ Cup and then maybe we would take him back to Hong Kong for the big mile race in December.

“I don’t think we will carry on racing him after that. He is too valuable to keep racing and he couldn’t really achieve much more than he has done.”

Where Variety Club will stand in 2015 is unresolved”. Whether he goes to stud in South Africa hinges largely on whether there is any relaxation in export protocols.

Brugman said: “We would like to bring him back. The money he could earn is better in the Northern Hemisphere but we have a loyalty towards South Africa.

“Nothing is cast in stone but ideally we would like to shuttle him, maybe standing his first season in the Northern Hemisphere and then coming here.

“If we can’t do that, then we would have some hard decisions to make.”

Multiple G1 winner Yorker, winner of the Sansui Summer Cup, Horse Chestnut and President’s Champions Challenge, and the exciting Red Ray are now in Mauritius with the rest of De Kock’s export contingent bound for Dubai.

“If they travel well they will all start off in Dubai and then we will see. I think Red Ray is good enough to win a Group 1 anywhere in the world and he would be pretty competitive over six furlongs at Royal Ascot,” Brugman said.

Meanwhile the recently retired champion mare Beach Beauty is to be honoured at Greyville in Durban on Gold Cup Day with a major feature event bearing her name and a special farewell parade.

Gold Circle is to link her name to the G1 Champions Cup to mark her retirement to stud.

Adorned with a Champions Sash, Beach Beauty will lead the field out for the race and be led into the Gold Horseshoe in front of the grandstand by her owners and trainer Dennis Drier to the strains of Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys.

She will be unsaddled and the Champions Sash replaced by a Drakenstein Stud sash as she is symbolically handed over to Drakenstein’s Kevin Summerville.

Beach Beauty won 17 of her 31 races including five G1 events in KwaZulu-Natal and the Cape in the Garden Province Stakes twice, Paddock Stakes twice and Majorca Stakes plus six G2 races.

She is set to be served by Duke Of Marmalade or Trippi in her first season at stud.


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