So You Think wins second Cox Plate
To be the best is never easy. To be the best horse trained by Bart Cummings requires a horse to take on many of the best trained in Australia in the past half century.
However, So You Think is already entering the great trainer’s thoughts after he won the Group One Cox Plate for the second successive year. To put the four-year-old’s achievement into some context, So You Think joins the likes of Phar Lap, Tobin Bronze, Kingston Town, Sunline and Northerly as a multiple winner of Australasia's weight-for-age championship on only his 10th career start. And he made it look so easy.
Steven Arnold had So You Think just behind the pace that was set by More Joyous, with the Macau runner Luen Yat Forever on the rail in third. There was already a sense of when, not if, Arnold would set So You Think alight and he chose the three-furlong marker. Zipping had moved up to third, but was already under pressure to even get that close as So You Think pulled away from the toiling More Joyous in the home straight.
Arnold never had to put the winner under any great pressure as he won by one-and-a-quarter lengths from Zipping, with Whobegotyou a head away in third.
The 82-year-old Cummings, who was winning his fifth Cox Plate, has had to fight back from ill-health this year but a third Group One winner of the year – all from So You Think – was just the tonic the iconic trainer needed. "He did a good job, didn't he?" Cummings said. "He took on the speed and just out-paced them. What can you say?"
What can be said unequivocally is that So You Think is the first horse to win the Cox Plate as a three-year-old and go on to win it at four and was also the race's shortest-priced favourite in more than 40 years. Quite where he stacks up in the list of Cummings champions is a question that the man himself finds a lot harder to deal with. "It's hard to compare them all," he said.
"They've all been champions really and there have been some very good ones, but I'd say this horse is up with the best at this stage."
And, unlike the heroes of the past, So You Think is not finished yet with Cummings looking to step him up to six furlongs for the Melbourne Cup on November 2nd. "He's got a lot of ability,'' Cummings said. “The Melbourne Cup is definitely on the agenda.”
Cummings is considering running So You Think in the Group One Mackinnon Stakes at Flemington before the colt attempts to win a 13th Cup for his trainer.
“He's just a great horse and showed his qualities today,” Arnold said. “When we got down to the 600m I thought I'd turn on the gas. It's a race where the strongest horse wins and he was that today.
“I got to the bottom of him and he had a bit of a look around at the corner which he did last year as well. But he's an exceptional horse.”
Come Melbourne Cup day he may make everyone think just that.
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