A PRECISION PLAN. A PERFECT OUTCOME. THE FULL STORY BEHIND HADOUKEN’S DARWIN CUP WIN

By Graham Potter | Monday, August 5, 2024

When an ambitious plan has a perfect outcome.

That is the back-story of the Gold Coast based trainer Peter Robl and the six-year-old gelding Hadouken after the son of Real Impact made it a perfect three wins from three starts over the Darwin Carnival when completing the hat-trick by taking out the $200 000 Great Northern Darwin Cup at the Fanny Bay racetrack on Monday.

The three wins were worth a combined total of $180,750 to the winning connections.

While the Darwin Cup win came under a great ride from Tyler Schiller, Peter Robl’s role from the pre-planning draft to the final strategy’s implementation in its various stages … all the while monitoring and ensuring that Hadouken would be right to go when facing the starter, was a mammoth effort … and that included selecting the horse for the assignment in the first place.

“I selected Hadouken because I thought he met the criteria of a horse you would like to take to Darwin in the sense that he is a very relaxed, casual horse at home. Nothing really fazes him at all, and he is a very good eater” said Robl, explaining the first step in the process.

“Also, I thought his racing pattern would suit Darwin. He likes a firm surface. He naturally races up on speed.

“He does lack a turn of foot in his races which brings him undone a little bit at home but, in Darwin, the solid tempo can take away the turn of foot aspect. He is a solid horse over 2000m and, while he lacks a bit of brilliance, he is genuine, so I thought he had all the right attributes to handle the racing in Darwin.”

Step 1: Horse selection. Box ticked.

Outside influences did help play a part in getting Hadouken to the front of that queue.

“We’d had a wet season here in Queensland and he doesn’t like soft or heavy tracks at all,” continued Robl. “He had to keep racing on them because otherwise he would largely have been standing in his box for two months … and he was struggling on those tracks, which we know he does.

‘That’s when I thought, we are kind of going up and down in the one spot with the horse here. Even if it didn’t rain for two weeks, the tracks just weren’t drying out, so that’s when I suggested to the connections that a trip to Darwin might be in order for him.

“That option probably first came to mind about three or four months ago.

“At that stage I even thought if he was not good enough to end up running in the Cup, there were other races that I believed he could run in and win which would pay for his trip.”

And what about the trip … all 3 500km of it (one way)?

“That’s why I say you need the right horse,” answered Robl.

“He left Toowoomba at 8am on a Wednesday morning. They travelled to Roma … and stayed overnight. Then on the Thursday they to Blackall … stayed overnight. Then on Friday they travelled from Blackall to Tennant Creek … stayed overnight. Then on the Saturday they travelled to Darwin … and they got into Darwin at around two o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

“You take a trip from 8am on Wednesday to 2pm on Saturday and you are going to need a horse that is going to drink and eat when it needs to, otherwise it takes them too long to recover from the trip when they get to Darwin.

“Again, he was just the right horse. He ate the whole way. He drank the whole way. He got off the float on Saturday afternoon in Darwin like he’d just gone for a run up the street.

“He acclimatised straight away and, apart from Darwin being several degrees hotter than the Gold Coast during the day, the nights aren’t too dissimilar, and the humidity is pretty much the same this time of the year, so there wasn’t much difference in the temperature for him which helped him acclimatise pretty much straight away.

Step 2: The travel plan. Box ticked.

Now it was up to Hadouken to perform.

First-up in Darwin was a 1600m Handicap on July 6.

“The 1600m … we ran him in that thinking it might be too short for him,” said Robl, “but we wanted to give him a run on the track before we got to the Buntine Handicap so that he’d had experience on the track … and had a nice hit-out, because he had been five weeks between runs and we didn’t want him to go into the Buntine having his first look at the track.

“The race panned out perfectly for him in that it wasn’t a fast run race, and he was able to travel on the bridle the whole way, which enabled him to finish off strongly. It was a really pleasant surprise with him kicking off with a win in Darwin.

Hadouken then targeted the Buntine Handicap over 2050m on July 20.

“His first win had given us a lot of confidence,” said Robl, continuing the story. “He pulled up good in the wind. I always knew he was going to be much improved second-up here in Darwin, heading into the Buntine, which was a race that we needed to win to get into the Cup.

“I think we were still had a 71-rating at that point, so if he didn’t win the Buntine, he wasn’t going to make the Cup field. Not all would be lost if he didn’t win the Buntine, because there was a consolation race on Cup day over the same distance and I would naturally have been confident he would win that which would pay for his expenses.

“But then, when the field came out for the Buntine, I could hardly believe it.

“The race just mapped perfectly for him, so I was extremely confident going into the Buntine that, with the right run, he would be winning.

“I was trying to leave no stone unturned in getting Hadouken past that hurdle though, so I actually talked Jarrod Todd into riding him. He is the best Darwin based rider and he duly won the Buntine pretty convincingly but, more importantly, the horse ran a very good time which lifted our confidence again going into the Darwin Cup.

“Having said that, and not taking anything away from Hadouken, all things being equal I did doubt if he had the class to beat Bear Story (the $2.30 race favourite) and Wolfburn ($6) and the always formidable Gary Clark / Jarrod Todd combination.

“I thought they were a bit classier than him, they were more experienced on the track than him and then he drew barrier twelve and the others both drew nicely … but, the fact that we were getting 7kg’s from the favourite (Bear Story) – 61kg to 54kg – that we’d run good time in the Buntine … and that, thirdly, I knew that Hadouken could run solid sectionals and still be strong over the 2000 …all brought us into the race.

“I said to Tyler (Schiller) that Bear Story is going to have to run us down … we are going to be in front of him. He is not going to be in front of us and that meant the favourite might just struggle to do that, second-up over ten furlongs in a fast run race.

“So, I did have some doubts, but I also recognised those pointers that were in our favour.”

“A good friend of mine … one of the Hadouken’s owners … spoke to Tyler (Schiller – who finished fourth behind James McDonald, Nash Rawiller and Jason Collett in last season’s Sydney Metropolitan Jockey’s Premiership) and asked him if I was happy to have him on in the Cup, would he come up for the ride.

“He said ‘yes’ straight away. When they rang me and said Tyler would be happy to come and ride him if you haven’t booked a jockey, I said ring him back and tell him to book his flight. That’s how he got booked and he was more than keen to come up and ride him.

“I did stress to Tyler beforehand that it is unique track and that the racing up in Darwin is unique.

“I said, I know you don’t want too many rides, but you certainly want a ride on the track before you ride him in the Cup. The track goes downhill from the 500 … and people tell you that the races up here are quick, but you kind of don’t really understand how quick they are unless you experience it, so I told him it would be good if he could up a ride in an earlier race … and luckily enough, for both of us, he picked up the winner on the race before the Cup.

Just another part of a precise preparation exercise.

“Well, we’d come a long way, and we didn’t want to leave anything to chance,” said Robl.

The race itself wasn’t pretty for a long way with Hadouken caught wide, but, in a post-race interview, a very calm Tyler Schiller said, “I didn’t think he did too much (in the first half of the race), because I was pretty quiet on him early.

“When I couldn’t get in, I was still out of the kick-back out wide, but I wasn’t using him to go forward at that point. It wasn’t till we got to that downhill that I thought I could use him without doing too much because the others were all stacked up.

“He kept going. He was brave … but, in the end, he won pretty easily.”

“I’m glad Tyler wasn’t worried. I reckon there was a few of us that were,” quipped Robl, “but I was confident from the top of the straight because I just thought he would out-grind Wolfburn … just knowing the type of horse he is … so I really enjoyed the last 400m immensely.

“There were half-a-dozen owners from the large ownership group there. A few flew up from Brisbane. A couple flew up from Melbourne. They were ecstatic.

“They had a great time watching their horse win the Darwin Cup.

“We had our plan. In the end though, Hadouken exceeded all expectations.”

Step three. The races. Box ticked.

Mission accomplished!

The end.

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