Awesome Rock has booked his place into the 96th William Hill Cox Plate field with Saturday’s win in the $250,000 Group 2 Dato’ Tan Chin Nam Stakes (1600m) guaranteeing his presence on October 22.
The Leon and Troy Corstens trained five-year-old landed his biggest scalp with a dominant two length victory ahead of Real Love and Set Square. Widely remembered for losing the 2016 Australian Cup on protest to Preferment in March, the Fastnet Rock entire is now on a path to the ‘Weight-For-Age Championship of Australasia’ in search of Group 1 redemption.
“We’ve got a golden ticket and we’re in”
“You don’t knock back a chance to run in one of the best weight-for-age races in the world,” Troy Corstens told the media post-race.
In what was just the horse’s third career victory, Awesome Rock had placed in seven of his runs at Group level. The decision to visit The Valley and familiarise himself with a circuit he had only raced at once previously on Tuesday morning reaped enormous rewards, settling in the back half of the field and weaving his way through smartly, to victory.
The run was his second this campaign and his regular rider Stephen Baster is hopeful the best is yet to come.
“I really had my fingers crossed that he would come back bigger and better and we can erase what happened last autumn and he did that today,” Baster reported.
Awesome Rock upset The Cleaner fairytale who was aiming to equal the record of three straight wins in the event and in doing so joined Fields of Omagh, Northerly, Sunline and Better Loosen Up as past winners of the race.
Awesome Rock defeated fancied Cox Plate hopefuls Set Square, The United States and Jameka who were each pleasing runs and could again battle do battle on October 22. The last horse to win the event in the same year as the W.S. Cox Plate was the Colin Little trained El Segundo in 2007.