Saffers pour into Australia
The rank and file of South African racing is feeling a bit left out, with dozens of the richer people in the local game off in Australia buying expensive horses.
Reports of this week's Melbourne Premier Yearling Sale rave about the South African buying posse and its eagerness to pay for choice ponies.Top trainers like Mike de Kock, Dean Kannemeyer and Geoff Woodruff are there.
South Africans at an Australian sale are nothing new, but the size of this contingent is rather larger than usual.
While South African-bred horses excel around the world, Aussie-breds also do well - including in this country. Durban July champ Igugu was a graduate of the Melbourne sale; Golden Chateau, Saturday's Guineas winner, was also born in Australia.
Enthusiasm for Australian bloodlines echoes words of praise about a horse by Banjo Paterson, that quintessential Aussie:
"In all the district from east to west.
In every show ring, on every course. They always counted the Swagman best."
Banjo also penned the lyrics of Waltzing Matilda and The Man From Snowy River. And he would have enjoyed Saffers clamouring for Aussie horses, for not only was he a fervent nationalist and racing devotee but he knew South Africa well, having written about and ridden in this land - during the Boer War - as a mounted front-line correspondent.
A lawyer, journalist, jockey, soldier, farmer and "bush poet", Banjo was once described as "the supreme balladist of the horse".
There isn't much balladeering in these parts. Folks back home might envy the spending spree down under, but an industry concern is that the money isn't being spent here, supporting local sales and breeders.
Some of the travelling crew might make it back home in time for today's Book II Cape Premier Yearling Sale, but will they have any firepower left in their wallets?
The Cape sale organisers have been on a countrywide roadshow to lure other owners and trainers to Cape Town with subsidised travel and accommodation, so there's bound to be some action. This auction is meant to be a "more affordable" affair that perhaps the Melbourne big bucks brigade might have passed on anyway.
Racing is fiercely results-driven and every source of good horseflesh will be tapped. Of course, globalised trade and internationalisation of racing will inevitably see rands spent offshore.
But it's worth reflecting on a Banjo ditty:
"It was while we held our races -
Hurdles, sprints and steeplechases
Up in Dandaloo,
That a crowd of Sydney stealers,
Jockeys, pugilists and spielers
Brought some horses, real heelers,
Came and put us through.
"Beat our nags and won our money,
Made the game by no means funny,
Made us rather blue;
When the racing was concluded,
Of our hard-earned coin denuded
Dandaloonies sat and brooded
There in Dandaloo."
- TURFFONTEIN, TOMORROW: PA - 1,9 x 4,7,8 x 1 x 1,10 x 1,7 x 4 x 2,7,8 (R72)