Horse Racing: Anthony Cosgriff to start British career through Gorge
Anthony Cosgriff, an Australian trainer and a regular blogger at the Racing Post (a horseracing website), is set to make an exciting, albeit a bit late, start to his new career at Newcastle in England on Saturday afternoon. The trainer moved to Britain
last year in autumn, although doubts had already begun to spring up about the future of jumping in Victoria.
Cosgriff, who has the experience of working as a veterinarian and has previously also worked for trainer Mark Johnson at Middleham, was forced to move himself and his family –an experience that they all found equally wearisome- when his earlier plans
of renting a yard in Warwickshire proved to be unsuccessful. The trainer is now forty one years old and finds himself with just one horse, which goes by the name of Gorge, at his current base at Malpas in Cheshire.
The trainer began his training career in Australia in the year 2006 and by the time he was ready to move on, he had gotten three winners and three seconds out of the most recent eleven racehorses under his care.
Trainer Cosgriff hopes to enter Gorge in last year’s Cheltenham Festival, were dashed brutally when the gelding sustained a stress injury to the knee (a fracture). The horse, currently at the age of nine years, eventually did make a comeback in the
Bet On ToteScoop6 At Totesport.com Handicap Hurdle which has kept Cosgriff’s dream to enter the horse in the festival from fading.
Reporters flocked to Cosgriff to find out what the trainer thought about Gorge’s chances at the Handicap Hurdle, and Cosgriff’s answer was rather optimistic. He told reporters that although Gorge has been inactive for almost a year now, he is still
vigilant and determined at training sessions and is proving himself to be ready to get into the business again. The trainer is hopeful that the horse will show off his top form and performance in all future races; however, he does not wish to pressure the
horse into winning since it will be Gorge’s “first look at these hurdles under racing conditions”, in the trainer’s words.
Gorge has also been entered in both the Coral Cup and the Martin Pipe Conditional Jockeys’ Handicap Hurdle at next month’s festival.
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