NORTHERN EMPRESS WINS IN A CAKEWALK

By Graham Potter | Thursday, December 23, 2021

The Michael Nolan stable, who had claimed the first race on the card at Toowoomba on December 23 with Adalissa, made it a race to race double when the two-year-old Northern Express took out the second race, a QTIS Two-Year-Old handicap over 1050m.

If Adalissa had won in comfortable fashion, Northern Express’s win was a cakewalk.

The son of More Than Ready, who was only having his second start, had shown to good advantage on his debut when finishing second at the Gold Coast to the Kacy Fogden trained Extremaarty over 900m. (Extremaarty has a throw at the stumps in the Group 3 B J McLachlan in his next start but was found wanting there in a race won by Coolangatta).

With expected benefit to come from that run, Northern Express jumped as a well fancied favourite and Isabella Rabjones decided to take any bad luck out of the equation by sending Northern Express into an immediate lead.

While the first four runners did race within only a couple of lengths of each other in the approach to the home turn, Northern Express was always in control of proceedings … a fact he emphasised by pulling well clear in the run home under fairly gentle urgings from Rabjones to score by an impressive 4.30 lengths.

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