The most accomplished galloper at Saturday’s Caulfield meeting is a little mare who is idolised by her trainer and who has given her jockey the best reason she has to ride horses.
Yosei has won Group One races in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, more than $1 million and last start got a close look at one of Australia’s best when third in the Doncaster a length behind More Joyous.
Yosei resumes in the Group Three Cockram Stakes (1200m) at Caulfield, a race in which she is clearly the classiest runner, but also one of the outsiders.
“There’s not many who have won three Group Ones,” said her trainer Stuart Webb.
“She’s a fighter, a real battler who tries her heart out.
“You have to be a bit in awe.”
But there is critical aspect of Yosei’s record that helps make her a $26 chance on Saturday: apart from her three wins at the top level, her only other success has been in a Benalla maiden.
Webb points out that the record is what it is because Yosei has mostly tackled the best races.
They have ranged from the 1100m of her first win to the 2500m of the VRC Oaks and just about everything between.
“The Oaks was probably asking a lot, but she’d won the Thousand Guineas two starts before, so we had a crack,” Webb said.
Her other Group One wins came in the 2010 Sires’ Produce Stakes at Randwick and the following year’s Tatt’s Tiara at Eagle Farm.
In all but three of her 24 races, Yosei has been ridden by Michelle Payne who returned to race riding last weekend after three months off recovering from spine and rib fractures suffered in a fall at Donald.
After three serious falls, Payne, the youngest of 11 children and the eighth of them to become a jockey, admitted this week she was a lot closer to the end of her career than the start.
“I wanted to ride Yosei this spring, and I wanted to prove I could still do it.
“But my brothers are at me to stop. Maybe after another season.”
