Leap To Fame completes marathon journey to Victoria

Leap To Fame (Bettor’s Delight) completed his nearly 1,800km journey from Queensland earlier this afternoon, arriving in Victoria ahead of next week’s Grand Circuit harness racing mission.

The star pacer will use Saturday night’s Hyland Harness Colours Group 3 Smoken Up Sprint as a lead up to next week’s Group 1 $300,000 Sportsbet Victoria Cup.

Trainer-driver Grant Dixon’s wife, Trista had the duty of driving the champion down the east coast of Australia

“The drive was good, we had a really good trip and we broke it up a bit for him,” Trista, who trains in an unofficial partnership with husband Grant, said.

“We haven’t been here long so it is hard to tell, but everything seems well so far.”

The two-day journey was broken up with stops in New South Wales along the way.

“We left home yesterday morning (Oct 2) at 4am and we went to Robbie Morris’ place at Menangle and spent the night there and left this morning (Oct 3) and drove to Tarcutta and gave him a break there and came the rest of the way.”

The trip went off without a hitch for the champion pacer, who has earned over $three-million-dollars.

“He travels really well and he has his friend with him, so they both travelled fine” Trista said. “Everything is fine at the moment, he is out in the paddock and he has got his head down.”

Leap To Fame’s owner, Kevin Seymour made the difficult decision to make the trip by road after being grounded by a lack of flights from Brisbane to Melbourne.

The winner of 42 of his 53 starts will line-up in Saturday night’s Hyland Harness Colours Group 3 Smoken Up Sprint as a lead up to next week’s Group 1 Sportsbet Victoria Cup.

The boom pacer will be looking to take out this year’s Grand Circuit classic and join Preux Chevalier as just the second harness horse in history to claim the “Big Four” after claiming the AG Hunter Cup (2024), Miracle Mile (2023) and the Inter Dominion (2023).

For complete race entries, click here.

by Lachlan Mitchell, for Harness Racing Victoria