Certainly by numbers the Queenslanders looked to have a strong grip on the event, but it was a local - one who travelled all of three kilometres to get there - who took out the Casino Regional Final of the TAB Million Dollar Chase on Friday afternoon.
Painted Picture, trained by Mark Wilkes, maintained a marvelous record at his home track and staved off the Queenslanders to take out the Final and qualify for the Million Dollar Chase semi-finals to be held at Wentworth Park on October 11.
The story behind how Wilkes came about Painted Picture is an interesting one.
Wilkes helped out his good mate Terry Jordan by paying for the service to Fernando Bale for Terry’s bitch Amy Lyndan.
“It’s a bit of a long story, but I said to Terry that if I pay for the straw and the vet, we’ll make a deal with whatever comes, and in that deal I ended up picking two dogs and one of them was Painted Picture. The other one, Golden Picture, has only had five starts for two wins and he can gallop, he just has had toe problems. It’s not a bad litter.”
Jordan too did well from the litter securing Fernando Blaster who was a luckless favourite in the Group 1 National Derby earlier this year and won a heat of the Group 1 Golden Easter Egg.
Painted Picture - who had qualified fastest for the Casino Regional final with a brilliant 27.31s win last Friday - has now had five starts over the 484m at Casino and won each of them, clocking 27.46s in the final. He has also raced three times over the 411m trip at the track and won twice and was second on the other occasion. Friday’s victory was Painted Picture’s 18th win from 35 starts and you can throw in another 13 placings.
“Yeah he does love it here. It’s just three kilometres from home,” Wilkes said. “I started setting him for this when it was first announced that Casino was getting into the series.
“The beauty with the dog is his starts. Even though he didn’t quite start as well as he can today, he put himself into the race. He’s not the best dog in the world, but he’s a professional dog, and to win today … that field was the equivalent of a group race.”
Wilkes has had cerebral palsy all his life, and as such he can’t drive for many hours at a time. This presents a problem getting to Sydney for semi-finals. He says he has thought about it, but now has to make plans.
While the Queenslanders were thwarted, the Sunshine State did get their first 2019 Million Dollar Chase semi-finalists, with Selena Zammit’s Pitch Black Jet finishing second, just a head away, Brandi Alexander trained by Tom Tzouvelis was third a further three lengths back, while Craig Hazelgrove’s Wise Misty was a half head away in fourth, securing the final semi-final berth.
* Photo by Lisa Vanderstok
