Horse Racing: Zenyatta lights up Hollywood Park with her 17th straight win
Seventeen wins in seventeen starts. Hollywood park was the stage, Zenyatta, the star. Zenyatta’s strengths are her finishes. She held back during the start of the race but finished in magnificent style, the crowd of 12 thousand strong in attendance was kept on edge. Winning streaks for Cigar, Citation and Mister Frisky had come to a conclusion by their 16th win and there were fears that Zenyatta would share the same fate. Those concerns were proved groundless when the mare turned on the turbo chargers. The words of her owner, Jerry moss, “What a race, what a race,” say it all.
Hall of Fame Jockey, Mike Smith, didn’t have it easy at all. Through a significant length of the track Zenyatta was trailing the field. Smith asked more from her and the mare delivered. St. Trinians was eventually helpless to stop her, but not without a fight. “When we headed for home, I hit a real big gear and she hit another one right back at me”, Smith said about the competition on the track. “I said, Whoa, she’s serious. She’s going to make me run. I was working at it until the last 100 yards and then I knew I’d outgrind her.”
Into the final leg of the race, trailing St Trinians, with Jockey Martin Garcia, and Zenyatta go head to head. St Trinians was just not letting up and with 7 wins in 12 starts, she was no pushover. The crowds, it seemed, wouldn’t get what they came out to see, Zenyatta’s 17th undefeated win. But that’s just Zeynatta’s trademark. She always teases the crowd right to the end, worrying fans that she might not make it.
Not everyone, though, was counting her out. "I was watching the distance between the horses," her trainer John Sherriff said. "It was staying about the same. And she hadn't started her kick yet". The finish line was rapidly approaching on the $250,000 Grade I Vanity Handicap at Hollywood Park. The final Eight of the mile Zeynatta covered in just 11.2 seconds. It was breathtaking, exhilarating, enthralling and all manners of ‘ing’ to watch the mare pull in front at the last moment of the race by a half-length to secure her 17th win. "My heart almost came out of my chest," Mark Mitchell, St. Trinians trainer, said. "It was such a fun race to be in".
You could tell Zenyatta was pleased and so were the crowds. Thanking the gods of thoroughbred racing to have Zenyatta race again after she was retired by her owners at the end of 2009. “We brought her back because she loved her job,” Ann Moss said. “She still had a lot of life in her. This is what she likes to do, this is where she lives. We asked John [Sherriff], can she do another year? He said, yeah, I think so. And we said fine, we’ll unretire her.”
There may yet be more action for Zenyatta and St. Trinians in August with a possible rematch. Their trainers believe they were both in excellent conditions and their performance certainly is a testimony to that. The 300,000 dollars Clement Hirsch stakes at Del Mar could possibly be the venue for the rematch. Her trainers and owners have not yet committed her to the race. John Sherriff said that the decision would not be made until later after they watch how the Del Mar track performs. Zenyatta won that race in 2008 and 2009. “We’ll see how things are”, Sherriff said.
Zenyatta raced the 1 1/8 mile track in one minute 49.01 seconds and with her Hollywood park win, her total earnings add up to an impressive $6,074,580.
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