It is a riveting daily show that runs until Monday.
The chase for the Australian Jockey’s Premiership title for the 2022/23 racing season is going down to the wire in a fascinating contest between Aaron Bullock and Jimmy Orman … two jockeys trading winner for winner in their battle for title supremacy as they race each other, many thousands of miles apart.
When the sun came up yesterday (Tuesday) the scoreboard read:
Bullock 193.5 wins. Orman 191.
For Jimmy Orman, who recently became the youngest rider (and just one of three) to claim one hundred metropolitan wins in a season in Queensland, Tuesday’s battleground moved to the provincial meeting at Gatton today with Orman going back to where it all kicked off for him with his mother, to whom he was apprenticed, being a Gatton based trainer.
Orman would ride two winners on the Gatton card … book-ending the meeting … but Bullock, who was in action at the same time at Newcastle, also put another win on the scoreboard.
Bullock 194.5. Orman 193.
By the end of Wednesday, we had a new leader after Orman went one better than his Tuesday double, landing a treble at Doomben to swop positions on the leaderboard with Bullock, who failed to add to his score on the day.
Orman 196. Bullock 194.5.
That turnaround underlines the huge momentum surge Orman is carrying into these concluding stages of the contest. That’s eight winners for Orman now in his last three meetings (he also rode a treble at the Sunshine Coast last Sunday).
On Thursday Orman will travel to Ballina in New South Wales … ever in search of more winners … where he has been booked for four rides. Bullock has the same number of rides at Kembla Grange … after which the season’s end will be just five days away.
While the Australia Jockey’s Premiership title is the main prize, the very real distinction of reaching two hundred winners for the season also remains very much in play for both Orman and Bullock.
Whichever way the dust settles at the end of it all, both riders have put in a herculean, twelve-month shift of which they can be very proud.
