Dubai: With all eyes looking towards the Dubai World Cup meeting which is just seven weeks away almost every race in the UAE has gained some sort of significance.
While the Meydan’s Carnival meetings remain the focal point, the action at Jebel Ali and Abu Dhabi racecourses are also capable of throwing up some thought-provoking clues.
Sunday’s HH The President’s Cup meeting, for example, presents a great opportunity to gauge the form of some of the horses who are being prepared for the big race day on March 29. With the big race prizes in everyone’s thoughts connections are grabbing every opportunity to prep their hopefuls.
South African champion Mike de Kock, whose horses do particularly well at Meydan, has developed a reputation of being a very shrewd handler and he does not miss a beat when it comes to presenting a horse with the chance to prove himself to be a big-race player.
This week he takes his ageless sprinter Kavanagh to contest the HH The President’s Cup in Abu Dhabi, which may come as a surprise to many, but not to those who understand the lengths to which de Kock is prepared to go in his pursuit for success.
Firstly, his horses have had to endure a circuitous journey from South Africa to get to Dubai, a quarantine-imposed voyage that included lengthy stop-overs in Mauritius and England. Not the ideal preparation for an equine athlete who will have to be at his or her best in the competitive cauldron at Meydan. Most trainers would think twice about the financial costs and attrition that their horses would be subjected to before they commit, but De Kock is getting used to the idea and has been forced to undertake this excursion for a couple of years since the outbreaks of African Horse Sickness in his native South Africa.
I’m sure it must cause him a great deal of frustration, but given his army background, he has proven resilient that most other trainers.
Once here all seems to be forgotten and his attention is focused on the race tracks of the UAE which have provided him with success, entertainment and drama in equal measure ever since he first made his presence known here during the early days of the Carnival.
The upcoming Dubai World Cup meeting is surely to be another highly anticipated event for him and his team as they leave nothing to chance, having come such a long way.
