RAMPANT LION SCORES A HIGHLY EMOTIONAL VICTORY

By Graham Potter | Saturday, May 16, 2009

Lord Mayors’s Cup (Group 3) - 1615m. Time 1-18.35 Track: Good 3. Rail: Out 2m the entire circuit.
1 Rampant Lion; 2 Solo Flyer; 3 Rags To Riches.

Take a bow Lindsay Gough. The trainer was understandably emotional when Rampant Lion raced right up to his best level of performance to mow down the opposition with a determined, sustained finish to win in fine style. The horse was twice within an inch of retirement, but Gough’s patience and the vet’s care worked its magic and brought the horse back to its peak. All it needed was for his old mate, Shane Scriven, to give him a perfect ride and he duly obliged for the duo to land a famous victory.

WINNER FEEDBACK:
Trainer Lindsay Gough: “He’s an old marvel. He’s been in and out and back again and away we go. It’s been a roller-coaster ride. I didn’t expect him to sprint like that. He just busts his gut every-time. He is just something special. We love him mate.

“When he hurt his neck (a couple of months ago) I thought he was buggered. I thought he’d run is last race, to be honest with you. I had a few tears. At that time it looked like that was it, but here we are today. Weight-For-Age is his go, that’s for sure. He’s got a great record at WFA. Without being too confident today, we just picked a race we thought he would do well in and that’s the way things panned out. How can you be confident in a Group 3? But then again, his first-up run was super. I think he is going better than ever. He really is. He is like a good bottle of red, isn’t he?

“The original aim for this prep was the Doomben Cup. With the setbacks he’s had we couldn’t get him ready in time. I don’t know where he going next right now. I’ve still got to decide. We’ll sort that out next week. It’s either the PJ O’Shea or the Stradbroke.

“He is what we get up for everyday and we’ve had a lot of good times with him. I spend a lot of hours with this old horse. We spend a lot of time with him at Nudgee Beach. With his old legs, we don’t like to work him too hard in the tracks. We put a lot of time into him, I suppose, so it’s rewarding for everybody when you get a result like this. We gave him a long spell and then gave him his chance ... and this is probably his best prep.

“I wanted to have a career training horses, mate ... and he’s probably my only hope of getting some recognition at this stage. He’s a good horse and they are hard to get, as you know. He’s doing a great job.”

Jockey Shane Scriven: “He is one of my favourites. We are about as old as each other. But I’ve never come as close to death as he as, you know. He was close to death six months ago. You know if he was a person they would have called the family to the bedside. When we had him in Melbourne, he went wrong and Lindsay (Gough) got a phone call, and we didn’t think we’d be bringing him home. They fixed him up ... brought him back. Then a couple of months ago he got this mystery ailment, which put him behind the eight ball again. They traced that to a problem with his neck and he overcame that ... and now mate, here he is. Without those setbacks, we would have been lining up in race seven (the Group 1 Doomben Cup - a race in which Rampant Lion finished second last year).

“The race was run nicely for him. He did worry me coming to the home turn. He spat the bit out and he didn’t pick up. I momentarily there thought he was going to struggle, but once I got him to the outside and gave him a couple he got to work. He’s just a freak, you know. He was struggling ... he picked them up ... he won easy. He lengthened at the right end of the race. That was the good part. He put me through a bit of worry on the home turn, but then he did his job.

“He is just so versatile and competitive. We are tossing up where to go next. We are tossing up between a 2200m and a 1400m. It doesn’t matter which one, because he is competitive in both. Lindsay just trains him for whatever race. A lot of the credit must go to Lindsay. The horse has got plenty of problems and Lindsay is there with him every morning. We just muck around with him. The old horse likes that and he is just such a pleasure to work with ... and then he repays you by doing that. God bless him.

“I don’t know which way Lindsay will go in the end, but he is a contender for the Stradbroke for mine. He’ll certainly be thereabouts. I won’t be able to ride him because I’m engaged to ride Marasco. If he’s stuck on my inside, I don’t care if he is my favourite, he won’t be getting out ... but he does go straight past me, I’ll be the one cheering.”

STEWARDS REPORT EXTRACT:
After passing the winning post S. Scriven (Rampant Lion) put the whip in his mouth whilst easing the horse down. S. Scriven was given an official direction that this is a practise he must not engage in in the future.

Jockey Shane Scriven (explaining his actions): “I just wanted to pat the horse after his effort, you know, and the whip was getting in the way. So the only place I could find for it was to put it in the gob. They (the stewards) chatted to me about it. They showed me footage of it. I looked like a dog with a bone. It didn’t look good. I could see where they were coming from. Strangely enough, after the Cup (on Scenic Shot), I stuck it in there too for about two strides and I thought, gee they’ve chipped me about this. I took it right out again.”