Te Akau Monday Update

David writes:

It's been another wonderful weekend for Te Akau Racing with winners coming left, right and centre.

For the third week we had winners on Friday in New Zealand, Friday night in Singapore, Saturday in New Zealand and Sunday in Singapore.

Yes we had a winner every day and Mark now moves to 11 in front on the Singapore Trainers' Premiership with just three weeks to go and Steve and Jamie are six in front on the Premiership in New Zealand.  We have won more stake money than any other stable, more Group and Listed races than any other stable and have a superb strike rate of 4.85.  That statistic tells me that we are putting the right horse in the right race.  This also tells me that our horses are fit, they are happy and they are simply winning races.

We had a great weekend starting on Friday - I took some very good friends from Singapore out on to Lake Taupo, Mr and Mrs Lim and their racing manager Mick Dittman.  Mick is a legend  of the turf in the world racing scene and he rode my first Group 1 winner in Australia when Te Akau Nick won the Metropolitan when trained by Gai Waterhouse - providing Gai with her first Group 1 win.

We had a lovely dinner on Friday night in Taupo before heading back to the farm on Saturday. I had enough time to go around the farm with my head stockman Luke Copeland before heading to Auckland for my daughter Sarah's engagement party.  We had a great night.  It was a lot of fun seeing all the family and her friends and I guess it is every parent's dream come true to see their children so happy.

Unfortunately the date clashed with Karyn's Christmas present I gave her last year - Elton John's one and only concert in New Zealand.  Karyn had wanted to see Sir Elton for years but when he came to New Zealand in the past, she was away.  So a tick off her bucketlist she says, and she and Sarah will be catching up for a celebratory bubbles soon!

On Sunday Karyn and I went to the Christmas Party at Antoine's Restaurant and enjoyed catching up with some really long-standing friends that I went to school with.  So this morning we were up bright and early as tonight we have two very special friends from Coolmore Stud coming to stay - Michael Kirwan, Coolmore's General Manager in Australia together with owner Tom Magnier.  They have a beautiful filly called Love Triangle in work with Te Akau and she is trialling tomorrow.  She is coming up in a most pleasing manner and you will see a lot of her at Ellerslie over Christmas.

Speaking of good horses, Xtravagant has had a short spell at Te Akau Stud and is now back at Matamata in work and everybody could not be happier with him.

The Ready to Run Sale was a huge success and it is great to see the Chinese recognising that the New Zealand thoroughbred has so much potential and is such good buying because they were certainly responsible for spending a lot of money at Karaka last week.  I believe that they will be back bigger and stronger at the yearling sales.

The Savabeel colt I bought for $230,000 was sold in two hours - just so popular!  This is evry much the trend for horses that Te Akau buys so it always pays to be quick off the mark to avoid being disappointed.

This week we are busy putting super phosphate on the farm plus 500 tonnes of lime and we are sending a truck and trailer load of cattle off each day.