Jet ready for take-off in Great Southern Star

Anton Golino’s daring to dream that ultimate success on Friday night at harness racing’s Melton track could also lay the foundation for the experience of a lifetime.

The Yabby Dam Farms trainer’s prepared two for tonight’s What The Hlll Great Southern Star heats, Always Ready and brilliant mare Im Ready Jet, with the latter to start heat two from gate one, directly inside her lead rival Majestuoso.

“I haven’t made any secret about how hugely I think of her,” Golino said. “I’ve been fortunate to have some nice horses and she’s right up there with the best of them.

“She’s great for the farm, we bred her, she’s by a stallion we stand in Quaker Jet and is a real product of what we want to achieve, so it’s very satisfying.”

He captured the Great Southern Star, Australia’s premier trotting prize, with Dance Craze in 2019, which brought “a feeling of massive relief”.

Much is on the line again for Golino and Yabby Dam Farms owner Pat Driscoll, who’s drawn on rich international bloodlines, particularly French, to revolutionise Australian trotting.

Im Ready Jet looks well placed to reward that investment tonight, having won her two starts this season in the Group 1 Aldebaran Park Maori Mile, when she “hit the line really good”, and the Group 2 E B Cochran Trotters Cup, when she “was super”.

“(The Great Southern Star) is always going to be a hard series, it doesn’t matter where you draw, it’s never easy,” Golino said. “It’s the 20 best trotters in Australia, they can all run fast when you get to this level.”

She’ll race her heat at 8.03pm followed by the $300,000 Group 1 final at 10.32pm, a brisk turnaround that Golino doesn’t “think will bother her, she’s a mentally tough horse”.

It’s a format made famous by Sweden’s Elitloppet and the US’s Little Brown Jug, and the stable’s optimistic a bold performance could be a pathway to Im Ready Jet gaining an invitation to the world stage.

“It’s our dream, it’s everyone’s dream, to have these horses get to that level of competitiveness overseas,” Golino said.

The prospect would also thrill another Australian trotting trailblazer, Duncan McPherson, principal of Aldebaran Park and a driving force behind the Great Southern Star’s return last year to a heats into final format.

The series is also part of the rich Aurora Australis, which McPherson said was “lucrative enough to encourage international participants in the future to come race in Australia”.

McPherson’s been at the forefront of building a broodmare base from the US and Sweden and, along with Australasian studs, raising the local talent level with international bloodlines.

That includes Aldebaran Revani, a New Jersey purchase who will step from gate seven in tonight’s second Great Southern Star heat.

“She has lots of gate speed, she just wanted a front row draw, so now it’s possible,” he said. “She’s got to go forward. She’s bred to run, that’s what she did in America. The main thing is she’s there, she’s in it and there is global interest.”

And, McPherson said, “the world is watching”.

To view the fields for Melton on Friday click here.

By Michael Howard for HRV