After nearly 11 months of listless performances, Golden Mile resurfaced as a winner when scoring in the Group 2 Theo Mark Stakes at Rosehill.
The Astern colt was last seen inside the winners’ enclosure at the end of the Group 2 Callander-Presnell Stakes at Randwick last October, a success that followed his victory in the Group 1 Caulfield Guineas.
And after six failed attempts he gave trainer James Cummings reason to smile again as he finished the 1300m contest strongly under Nash Rawiller, who rode him along the fence to victory by a neck from Tegan Keys’ The Inevitable, the ride of Ryan Maloney. A further neck back in third was Chris Waller’s Waterford with Tyler Schiller up.
“He’s a very talented horse and we’ve kept him in training for a reason, and hopefully we can land another blow,” Cummings said.
“What I love is by winning the Theo Marks he’s a Group 2 winner as a four-year-old and it gets a rap back on the horse. If you think about it, he stormed away to win the Ming Dynasty on this day last year.
“I’m not adverse to running the horse in the Premiere Stakes in three weeks, but we’ll see how he pulls up. A deserving victory for a horse who has been training so well for so long and not even running places.”
Cummings and Rawiller had earlier won the Group 2 James Squire Run to the Rose with Cylinder, with the trainer ending the day with a hat-trick courtesy of Red Card who went gate to wire in the 1100m Precise Air Handicap under Adam Hyeronimus.
.jpg)