Te Akau Tuesday Update

David writes:

Firstly, this time next week we will be in Spring. How exciting is that!?

It has been a long and frustrating winter, and it is always great to see the start of Spring.

The grass starts growing, the blossoms are out, and the horses look better in their coats. The days are longer, the foals are arriving and this warmer weather just makes us all feel a lot better about most things in life - except the COVID situation of course.

Speaking of foals, we had our first arrival for the season last week. Born at Newhaven Park in Australia, Meteoric Lass foaled an Xtravagant filly. She is a cracker of a foal! What's even more exciting is that Meteoric Lass will be served by Cool Aza Beel this season.

We have several mares who are also due to foal in the next week, which we are very much looking forward to.

We had another great weekend in Singapore by winning a further two races, which means that our Singapore based trainer Mark Walker is only one win behind the leader in the Trainers' Premiership.

Our apprentice K Hakim has had 43 wins this season and is ahead of Singapore's leading jockey Danny Beasley who is currently sitting on 33 wins, and Vlad Duric has 28 wins.  Te Akau Racing has had a fantastic run over the years with our apprentices. It is obvious that they don't get much better than Hakim, who is just doing an incredible job.

I would like to thank all our owners for their support and understanding that they have given us all during these very frustrating times that we are in. Hopefully we could be back racing in the next week, although probably not in the Auckland area.

Even during the Level 4 lockdown, life has to continue on the farm as looking after the livestock and bloodstock is an essential service. Lambing has finished, and we now have our sights set on docking next Monday. We have had a fantastic lambing this season, the ewes are really doing the lambs very well. I believe we are in for a record lambing percentage.

I hope you are all safe and sound and taking good care of each other.  We are looking forward to getting back racing as soon as we can - meantime we will have Sword of State and Probabeel racing in Sydney and Melbourne respectively this weekend - so that will be something to look forward to.  Sword of State will be racing at Kembla Grange as the meeting has been transferred there - not ideal with the amount of rain they have had!

Entriviere has bounced back from her small hiccup and we look forward to her racing in early September. We looked seriously at taking nine-time Group 1 winner Avantage to Australia too but at this point of her preparation, we would like to see her kick off in New Zealand and defend her Group 2 Foxbridge Plate title and then head towards the Hawkes Bay Triple Crown races.

Let's all try to remain positive and hope that racing can soon return to our tracks and we can see the tangerine colours back in the winner's circle.