VANDYKE'S HOT STREAK CONTINUES

By Graham Potter | Sunday, October 29, 2023

The hot run of the David Vandyke stable in the second half of October continued on October 29 at the Sunshine Coast where Zaraydah scored a first-up win in a Maiden Handicap over 1000m.

Zaraydah was Vandyke’s sixth winner in twenty starts since October 15 (an impressive thirty percent strike-rate).

Adding further merit to the win was the fact that Zaraydah was resuming after a six-and-a-half month layoff, the fact that the four-year-old mare is still inexperienced with this being only her third career start … and the fact that this performance showed significant improvement on the two results of her previous preparation.

Zaraydah, who had Ben Thompson in the saddle for the first time in race action … Thompson had trialed her earlier in the month … jumped on the third line of betting at $5 behind his more favoured stable companion Commandoro ($2,90) and Targeted ($3).

In spite of having the supposed advantage of a number one barrier draw, Zaraydah did not have the early gate speed to match the pacesetters and when Thompson recognized that to be the case he chose to not force the issue, instead allowing the daughter of Darci Brahma to find her feet in her own time, a tactic which took her back to eighth place, but only a touch under four lengths off the leader as the field made its way towards the home turn.

While Thompson had Zaraydah saving ground throughout, that did bring traffic problems into play on straightening. Now sixth, still over three lengths back, Thompson had to ride for luck and the much needed gap he was searching for arrived between the two runners in front of Zaraydah coming through the 200m mark.

While that was happening, the $3 second favourite Targeted had skipped away up front, so that by the time Zaraydah has pushed through that gap, Targeted was still steaming towards the line with Zaraydah needing to make up two-and-a-half lengths with only 100m left to run.

And then, over those last 75m, Targeted ran out of steam … while Zaraydah remained strong to the line, cutting back the margin rapidly over the concluding stages to get up to score by 0.30 lengths,
As for the main fancy and the winner’s stable-companion, Commandoro was slow away at the break and was chased up to improve his position over the first 200m.

Commandoro did run on steadily enough in the home straight to finish only two lengths behind the winner, but, that early effort had arguably left him short on reserves in the final run home and he had to settle for fourth place.

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