Rockhampton based trainer Clinton Taylor’s star filly Chinny Boom will look to take the next step in her already burgeoning career when she raises the bar once again to Listed company at Doomben on Saturday where she will line-up in the Mick Dittman Plate.
Chinny Boom does have a runner-up finish to her name at Listed level, that result coming in the Mode Plate over 1200m back in December, but a win on Saturday would put an exclamation mark on a form-line which currently boasts five wins from six starts … that Mode second placing being her only defeat to date.
And that was only by the barest of margins … as Chinny Boom chased hard down the straight to get within half a stride of snaring Stroll, who went on to frank that form by finishing third in the Group 3 Vo Rogue.
Prior to that Mode defeat, Chinny Boom had kicked off her career with five successive wins which came with a combined winning margin of 20.75 lengths. She had jumped at a starting price of less than $2 on four of those occasions and her narrow defeat in the Mode did little to dent punter enthusiasm as to her prospects, so, when she reappeared after a four-month break from race action she was once again marked up at the restrictive odds of $1,60 in a three-year-old handicap over 1050m.
And, despite all that had gone before, it was to be that race, two weeks ago that marked Chinny Boom as something special.
Locked in behind and inbetween runners with nowhere to go at the top of the straight, Chinny Boom responded like a star, following every direction given from the saddle by Ben Thompson with such competitive precision that she managed to find clear running, albeit still in tight confines, inside the final 150m at which time her superior ability kicked in.
It was a pressurised finish all the way to the line, but Chinny Boom was simply too good at the end of it all and her sixth career win was in the record books.
“She’s a top-class filly. We always thought that,” said Taylor post-race.
“You don’t look at her and go ‘wow’. She is a leggy filly and doesn’t carry much weight. That’s why we are very gentle with her. We don’t gallop her a lot. We use a lot of swimming.
“Chinny Boom does things I’ve never seen horses do,” continued Taylor. “She was a bit scary the first couple of times we galloped her. I thought … hello, what’s she doing up here, but it is obviously great to have her.
“That last win was brilliant. I owe this to (owner) Mark Pascoe. He’s has turned down massive offers for this filly and given me the opportunity and the least I can do is try to get them some black type.
Jockey Ben Thompson was also full of praise for the filly’s effort in her last win.
“To pick herself up like that after she lost momentum was just enormous,” commented Thompson. “That usually would have been game over for most horses after that.
“To win by a length and beat so many good horses like that over 1000m where there is little room for error was unbelievable. There wasn’t a horse in that race who wasn’t a threat.
‘She’d obviously proved how good she was before that, but that win just reiterated that fact in no uncertain terms,” concluded Thompson.
Chinny Boom is currently the $3 betr favourite for the Mick Dittman Plate, but she has a real market rival on her hands in the form of the Tony Gollan trained Golden Boom, a gelding who can boats a similar impressive record of two wins from three starts.
