Masar - New Winner

With the Group One New Zealand Oaks (2400m) moving five weeks earlier to February this year, summer races over 2000 metres have taken on greater importance in the NZB Filly of the Year Series – starting with the $270,000 Group Two Sir Patrick Hogan Stakes (2000m) at Ellerslie on New Year’s Day.

The re-distribution of the Godolphin owned Australian racehorses has been a hot topic in recent weeks as they departed the care of James Cummings to join a wide spread of different trainers and one of those was Chris Waller, whose first runner for the blue army was a winner at Rosehill on Saturday.

While looking for an image of Snippets to go with our celebration of Snippets long form story before Christmas I was drawn to the back of my storage cupboard and there in a remote and dusty corner was a pile of Stallions books and 2001 gave me what I needed and also some serious food for thought.

Five year-old Needs Further gelding Durazzo continued his domination of the summer racing in Tasmania at Hobart on Sunday racking up his third successive stakes win when taking out the $125,000 Listed Kevin Sharkie The Inevitable Stakes (1600m), putting the spotlight on his yearling half-sister heading to 2026 MM Tasmania.

La Crique, arguably the most consistent horse in Australasian racing, has been retired.

Godolphin have a big stable in Australia featuring a lot of interesting blue-blood horses and a pretty unusual one cast off maiden status at Canterbury on Friday night.

Winner of the 2011 Group I MRC Caulfield Cup, South Australian bred star staying mare Southern Speed was retired to stud in Japan at the end of her career and was in the news this week when her four year-old son Cosmo Kuranda went within a whisker of winning the Group I Arima Kinen (2500m).

The last week of Christmas racing has been as busy as usual and thrown up plenty of black type updates, including five new stakes winners, for upcoming yearling sale.

Here is the full list of 21 stallions which had winners throughout Australasia today with winners and result details.

The 2026 NZB National Yearling Sales (January 25-29) offers buyers the cream of the New Zealand crop and in the weeks leading up to the sale we’ll go looking for pedigrees of interest for a myriad of reasons.