Tough filly Kiamichi, with the gold cap on top of her royal blue colours, led home a Godolphin trifecta in the 2019 Group 1 $3.5m Longines Golden Slipper (1200m) at Rosehill.
Kiamichi, above, wins the 2019 Golden Slipper at Rosehill. Photo by Steve Hart.
The powerful Godolphin Operation supplied six of the sixteen Golden Slipper runners with James Cummings saddling up five, including the first two placegetters, Kiamichi and Microphone, while Victorian trainer Anthony Freedman prepared the third placegetter Lyre.
Kiamichi was the outsider of the Godolphin runners at $26 but that didn’t bother Damian Lane who let the filly stride forward from a wide barrier and race on the pace.
Lane let Kiamichi roll to the fence in front at the 700m and filly was never headed after that and went on to record a one length win over her stablemate Microphone ($8).
Blue Diamond Stakes winner Lyre ($14) had a wide run throughout but was still able to run home strongly to find third position while the three other Cummings runners finished near the tail of the field with Pin Sec ($14) in twelfth position, Exhilarates ($20) fourteenth and Tenley ($4.80) fifteenth.
The Peter and Paul Snowden trained Cosmic Force was sent out as the $4.40 favourite and after having a nice run in behind the speed, was unable to make any impression on the leading division and struggled into eighth place.
Cummings was quick to the praise the toughness of the classy Kiamichi who handed him his first win in the Golden Slipper, the richest two year old race in the world.
“That’s some sort of race. Great credit to this horse. She’s just been able to come on the scene in such a way that suggested that she was just going too well to deny her a chance to be running in this race,” Cummings said.
“She’s our first two-year-old winner, we trained her for strength. I wanted to toughen these horses up all season and she was tough this week. She had an absolute ripper of a week.”
“Our first two-year-old winner of the season had the heart to get up and win on debut and she’s just kept improving, trained for 1200m all the way through and toughened up right until the grand final is very, very satisfying.”
“I can tell you she’s been squealing all week, she’s just been strong all the way through.”
