Want to see a quite amazing win … well, have a look at Venting’s win in the Metric Mile at Darwin.
Venting, the lesser fancied of the two Kerry Petrick trained runners at $17 with online betting sites, not only provided a boilover result in the Metric Mile, but he quite probably already sealed the performance of the Carnival with this last to first effort … a win achieved in such stunning fashion that he almost caught both the race commentator and the video cameraman totally off-guard.
Nobody was paying any great attention to the Aaron Sweeney ridden Venting when he raced ungenerously in last place all of ten lengths off the lead in the first half of the 1600m contest.
Even when Venting appeared to begin to improve as the field took the home turn, he was still well out his ground and six wide … really, you might have thought, nothing to see here … and, from that point until the very closing stages of the race … that is exactly what we got on the race coverage, nothing to see, at least as far as Venting was concerned. He had dropped right out of the picture.
So here we had the race in the home straight in picture … the one between Wolfburn ($4.80) who was trying to hold onto the lead, and Rematch and Magic Defense ($8) who were finishing strongly.
The race seemed to be between these three runners … until it wasn’t.
Venting suddenly came back into the picture, flying down the outside, to finish right over the top of those runners whose jockeys would have thought they were competing for the win, only to suddenly realise they were being relegated to the also-rans. They would not have seen Venting coming.
Whichever way you loom at it, this was an outstanding effort from Venting, a feature race win which came with the added reward of gaining a-ballot free entry into the Darwin Cup on August 3.
