Jack Duncan is the epitome of a trainer who lets his horses do the talking.
And sometimes … they make a loud statement.
That was certainly the case when Seat Of Power won the Toowoomba Cup on Saturday with the tried and tested son of Sea The Stars helping Duncan to back-to-back wins in the Toowoomba Cup after he had taken out last year’s edition of the race with Wapiti.
Winning two Toowoomba Cups in a row remains an exceptional training performance, even if Chris Waller did it as recently in 2019 and 2020 with The Mayor and Alward respectively, because, before that, you have to go all the way back to 2008 and 2009 when local trainer Rex Lipp landed the double with Sir Sensible and Jussemi. (Lipp, incidentally, has a second double to his credit winning with Gene’s Interest and Director’s Special in 1999 and 2000).
This latest acknowledgement of Duncan’s training prowess, which has always been widely recognised, is very well deserved, particularly as Duncan’s future looked uncertain in many ways on that terrible day at Doomben in late July 2021 when Duncan suffered a heart attack and collapsed in the tie-up stalls at the track and paramedics had to work hard to revive him.
The somber mood at the track lifted slightly … but only slightly … when it was learnt that Duncan had been revived and was off to hospital and, thankfully, that episode did have a happy ending when, after surgery, Duncan was on his road to recovery.
“It doesn’t make me want to stop training horses or anything like that, I want to keep doing that,” Duncan said while convalescing. “Nothing has changed, the show goes on.”
And indeed it does … and just two months after the heart attack, Duncan saddled his first Toowoomba Cup winner when Wapiti beat Honorable Spirit by just under half-a-length.
Now Duncan has two Toowoomba Cups wins to his name … in successive years … and, thus will be in line to make it a hat-track of wins in the race next year, a feat not previously listed in the complete official records of the race which date back to 1971.
It clearly was a special win for Duncan, whose quiet demeanour generally means he seldom has a huge smile on his face … but he had one on Saturday.
So, was he confident of the outcome?
“I thought it would be good to go back and have another crack after Wapiti last year,” said Duncan in his usual understated way.
“I just take things as they come, but I did have the race picked out for Seat Of Power for a while.
“The horse has been going well. His last win (in his previous start at Doomben) was good. I was just a bit worried about him going down the hill (referred to the downhill slope leaving the home straight for the first time), but once I saw him travel down the hill, I thought he would be hard to beat.”
Too hard in fact, although, in the end, Seat Of Power only saluted by the narrowest of margins from Aussie Nugget, but when the judge posted the numbers to confirm the result it was job done by the game, very well-prepared Seat Of Power, who got home under a peach of a ride from gun jockey Jimmy Orman to put that smile on Jack Duncan’s face.
