Newmarket’s 1,000 Guineas saw several threads of trainer Roger Varian’s career intertwining in the victory of his filly Elmalka, who took the season’s second classic on only her third racecourse start.
Varian had established his reputation during a ten-year stint with trainer Michael Jarvis. On Jarvis’s retirement Varian took over at Kremlin House, where Jarvis had trained. Jarvis’s first classic winner came in this race in 2001 with Ameerat who sported the same silks as Elmalka, both owned by Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum.
Varian’s first Group One winner on taking up his training licence was Nahrain in the 2011 Prix de L’Opera. Nahrain was also owned by the Sheikh.
It was therefore fitting for a variety of reasons that it was Nahrain’s daughter Elmalka who provided Varian with his first fillies’ classic win.
Starting a relative outsider at 28/1, Elmalka came into the race as a potential improver, but one whose form to date left her with plenty of that potential improvement to find. Third in one of the classic trials, Newbury’s Fred Darling Stakes, on her three-year-old seasonal reappearance she’d only had the one run at two, winning a maiden event on the all-weather surface at Southwell at the end of November.
That run had attracted the attention of a time analyst who Varian recalled had phoned him up after that racecourse debut to wax lyrical about the sectional times the filly had put up in that modest event. “Not a word of lie, he told me she could win the Guineas” recounted Varian although he admitted to taking the advice with “a pinch of salt”.
In the three weeks after Newbury Varian said the filly had come on a lot and they were very hopeful of a big run, which was exactly what they got.
In the race Elmalka started slowly from her stands side stalls draw, settling in last place of the 16 runners. Just over two furlongs from home jockey Silvestre De Souza pulled the filly into daylight and she opened up, finishing fast in the final furlong to get the better of Ireland’s Porta Fortuna and the French trained Ramatuelle.
It was a first classic winner for De Souza, a former three-time champion jockey in the UK and a third in total for Varian who has two St Leger winners on his roll of honour.
Elamalka, by the miler Kingman, is now likely to be kept to a mile with her next target the Coronation Stakes at Royal Ascot.
