There was no shortage of excitement at Chester on Friday as Strength Of Spirit recorded a thrilling win for his horse racing syndicate.
The two-year-old by Ulysses was having just his second racecourse outing in the Premium Selling Stakes for the Karl Burke team and showed a nice bit of improvement to make it second time lucky under Sam James.
The success means our last six syndicates with Karl Burke have now enjoyed that winning feeling – which just goes to show what an amazing job Karl does for our owners.
Unable to quite keep tabs on quite a frenetic pace early on, Strength Of Spirit was settled towards the rear by Sam, who wisely moved towards the inside of the course and bided his time.
As the race developed into the short home straight Strength Of Spirit began to pick up well but still had eight horses in front of him just over a furlong out.
Made to wait briefly before delivered with his run, Strength Of Spirit fairly powered home for a thrilling win, getting up in the shadows of the post for a narrow, yet decisive win.
In a race featuring last time out maiden winners and some promising individuals there was a good prize fund on offer for this premium seller, which meant Strength Of Spirit pocketed just over £12,000 for his first win – prize money akin to some Listed races and roughly three times what the average novice winner earns.
With the protection of a £50,000 claim for all runners, this was a typically smart piece of race placement by Karl Burke, with the further bonus that Strength Of Spirit will escape a penalty when he next runs in a novice. Talk about having your cake and eating it!
If the excitement of the race wasn’t enough, with this being a selling stakes, there was still the post-race auction to navigate.
Chester lynchpins Michael Owen and Hugo Palmer clearly fancied taking home our promising colt but after some competitive bidding, eventually gave best and allowed Strength Of Spirit to return home to Spigot Lodge for £42,000.
A 10% fee to the racecourse meant there was never any real danger of heading home with an empty horse box but this was still a second dose of adrenalin for Strength Of Spirit’s owners in little over 10 minutes. All in all its fair to say the post-race champagne never tasted better!
As owners reflected on an exciting win from their promising young horse, this was a good day however viewed, with Strength Of Spirit coming home with some good prize money, valuable experience, safe in the knowledge that he’ll be penalty free wherever Karl decides to run him next.
All in all, a good day then for Karl Burke’s owners and yet another winning horse racing syndicate for Hambleton Racing at Spigot Lodge with Karl.
