The Australian Group 1 season opened at Royal Randwick on Saturday 22 August, and it opened the way the market said it would. Autumn Glow won the Winx Stakes over 1400 metres for Chris Waller and James McDonald, beating Sheza Alibi by about a length and a quarter, with Gringotts back in third.
It was Waller’s tenth Winx Stakes — a race named for his own horse, and one he has now made his own twice over. The winning time was 1:21.03.
The market got it right, then tightened
Autumn Glow had been quoted around $1.90 in the days before the race and started $1.70. Sheza Alibi drifted the other way, from about $3.10 into a starting price of $3.50. Gringotts was $21.
Waller saddled eight of the fourteen runners. When one stable holds more than half a Group 1 field, the interesting question is rarely who wins — it is which of them the stable actually had aimed at it. This one was aimed.
What both of them did next
Neither horse stopped there. Sheza Alibi went to Flemington on 12 September and won the Group 1 Makybe Diva Stakes over 1600 metres for Peter Moody and Katherine Coleman, beating Autumn Boy by two and three-quarter lengths in 1:35.34.
Autumn Glow returned to Randwick on 19 September and won the Group 2 Seven Stakes over 1600 metres at $1.16, from Aeliana and Ceolwulf. Waller afterwards: “she just has a great turn of foot.”
