YELLOW BRICK - BEATEN BUT UNBOWED IN THE $2 MILLION MAGIC MILLIONS GUINEAS

By Graham Potter | Thursday, January 19, 2023

You only get one chance with any individual horse to win any two or three-year-old feature race ... and they seldom come as lucrative as the $2 million Magic Millions Guineas.

So, as a stable, when you send out the $2.70 favourite, as the Tony and Maddysen Sears training partnership did with Yellow Brick in the rescheduled/delayed 2023 $2 Million Magic Millions Guineas over 1425m at the Gold Coast on January 19, the random mix of emotions ... ranging from confidence to anxiety, from expectation to outright stress and seemingly a host of other feelings, some known, some unidentifiable ... all fuelled by a healthy flow of adrenaline that sets the body tingling with excitement ... you know this will be no ordinary race-day.

The confidence in the ‘King Of The Mountain’ hero Yellow Brick not only came from the stable, but the bookmakers arguably set the standard in that regard, making Yellow Brick up at $2.70 while the Peter and Paul Snowden trained Russian Conquest ($4.70) the only other runner quoted at less than $11.

Ben Thompson got Yellow Brick away reasonably enough at the break but, by the time the field had covered 200m the speed, both to his inside and outside, had shuffled Yellow Brick, who was not mustering his expected speed, back to eighth place, six lengths off the leader, racing just inside the $21 Fashion Legend who was caught four wide after jumping from an wide outside barrier draw.

Yellow Brick did make ground in-between runners in the sweep to the home turn and he was just two-and-a-half lengths behind the long-time leader Spiritualised on straightening, but he was still boxed in in-between runner at this vital stage of the running.

The run home wasn’t going to be the happiest of ones for Yellow Brick.

Thompson briefly flirted with a run on the inside, regrouped for a moment and then sent Yellow Brick forward aiming at a gap between Soothsayer ($26) and Stroll ($16), who had raced second and third respectively until that stage ... but, just as he got there, Soothsayer laid in under pressure, inconveniencing Yellow Brick for a couple of strides forcing him to marginally adjust his line.

All the while Fashion Leader, out wider on the track, was moving forward in tandem with Yellow Brick, and, while he had covered more ground than the Sears trained runner, importantly, he was in clear galloping room, with a straight line route to the winning post.

With 100m left to run, Spiritualised still led the race, but Yellow Brick (sprinting with meaning now down the inside) and Fashion Leader (fighting on gamely) both got to Spiritualised inside the final 50m.

You can only imagine the excitement that would have taken hold of the emotions of all involved in Team Sears as it looked for all the world that Yellow Brick was going to get up and defy the luckless passage he had endured ... and win ... but, arguably, it was Fashion Leader’s uninterrupted run when it mattered most that help hand back the advantage to the Richard and Will Freedman trained runner in those agonising final strides in which Fashion Leader’s stout effort prevailed, pushing Yellow Brick back into second place by a 0.30 length margin.

It's not all about the money ... but, just for the record, the difference between the first and second place prize-money was $810 000,

Ouch!

Disappointment ... yes, but there couldn’t be any real despair.

Taking the race circumstances into account ... or not ... it was a cracker of a run from the Tony and Maddysen Sears trained star and they can be very proud of the superb way in which they turned the son of The Mission out in fighting fettle on this day in particular, as well as their outstanding management of the horse’s career to date in general.

And there was a not too shabby little proviso at the end of it all.

As the first all female owned runner to finish in the Guineas, Yellow brick picked up the major share of the Magic Millions Woman’s Racing Bonus for the race.

Yellow Brick, who has only had five career starts, has won five times and has finished second and third, while banking $1 152 100 in prize-money with bonus earnings of $255 250.

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