Cranbourne Cup finally a target for Robbie Griffiths

Last May, the Cranbourne Turf Club announced it had shelved its traditional two-day carnival for a standalone Saturday meeting the week after the Melbourne Cup Carnival. Its flagship race, the 2025 metre Listed Cranbourne Cup, would drop to 1600 metres, but its purse would swell to $500,000.

The wisdom was that the Club could capitalise on a captive crowd, much as The Hunter meeting will do on Saturday north of the border, and likewise The Gong meeting at Kembla Grange in a few weeks’ time. The changes were welcomed across much of the Victorian industry, and the Cranbourne Cup meeting will occur this Saturday.

Locally, trainer Robbie Griffiths knows better than anyone the significance of the renovated meeting.

In the feature race, the 1600 metre Cranbourne Cup, Griffiths has the 6-year-old gelding King Magnus (Magnus) pointed at a first home-Cup victory, a race that has eluded the trainer so far.

King Magnus is pushing $450,000 in prizemoney and, since late June, he has been either first or second in six of his last eight starts. Last time out, he was fifth in a blanket finish of the G1 Cantala S., just 0.8l behind the winner, Superstorm (Sebring).

“He’s been racing very well all campaign,” Griffiths said. “He hasn’t put a foot wrong, and every one of his races has been terrific. He’s graduated from a restricted grade-rated horse to when he looked all but the winner in the shadows of the post in the Cantala, and he really did us proud in that.”

King Magnus has been a stout warrior this preparation, and Saturday’s Cranbourne Cup will be the gelding’s 10th race this side of a spell. However, he seems to thrive on racing, and Griffiths said all the indicators are that he has a run left in him.

The gelding is currently sitting third as a betting option for the race. His form is great but his barrier not so much, having drawn 11 with jockey Lachlan King.

“Good barriers are always better wherever you go,” Griffiths said. “But he’s a horse that balances in the middle of the field. The weather map is very bad for Friday, so that suggests there’s a lot of rain coming. By race 7 on a nine-race program, the track could be playing to the wider lanes if the forecast is correct, so barrier 11 might not be a big issue for this horse.”

King Magnus will cart 56kg, as against the top-weights Buffalo River (USA) (Noble Mission {GB}) and So Si Bon (So You Think {NZ}), who will lump 60kg apiece.

Realigning the Cup

Griffiths is yet to win a hometown Cranbourne Cup, but there’s a reason for that. In its previous form over 2025 metres, the trainer often didn’t have the horses to target it.

“I think it’s every trainer’s dream to win their hometown Cup,” he said. “It’s very parochial for anyone to have the luxury and honour of winning something like that, and we’ve never won this race before. All of these years, we’ve focused on horses bred for sprint distances up to 1600 metres, because owners were looking for quick returns or those VOBIS dollars, so that predominantly didn’t include horses that were catering for 2000 metres.”

The abbreviated distance of the race will therefore suit Griffiths very well. He said the Cranbourne Cup had often been a prelude for other races, like the Caulfield Cup.

“Now that the race has been shortened to a mile, we suddenly had the ideal horse for it, so here we are,” he said.

The pulling in of the Cranbourne Cup distance was, in a way, an effort to meet a market with mile ambitions.

Griffiths said there were already plenty of races at the former distance rolling into the spring carnival, whereas the mile-range of this race is now a natural flow-on from the Toorak into the Cantala, with the potential for horses to roll on towards the 2000 metre BM78 race on Pakenham Cup Day.

“I think the Cranbourne Cup really complements the racing program now,” Griffiths said. “It was starting to slot into a tricky position at its former distance, and it ran the risk of not being able to attract the right horses. So there came a time when it was up for discussion, and Neil (CEO Neil Bainbridge) has done a fantastic job to work in with Racing Victoria and Greg Carpenter’s programming team to give this a try.”

Griffiths said that, as a result, Saturday’s race had drawn a strong field. He said King Magnus was a looming likelihood out of the Cantala S. but despite that, the horse was still only on the third line of betting.

“It goes to show you the depth of the race,” he said. “They’ve done a very good job to attract such a high-quality field in its inaugural running, which complements their decision to do it, and it justifies where they’ve aligned it with the Racing Victoria program.”

Big changes

Griffiths has been at the Cranbourne facility since its very earliest days in 1991. He’s part of the local furniture, and he's seen the place ebb and flow over the decades. More recently, he’s seen it blossom.

Gallery: Some of the Griffiths de Kock Racing facilities

With the closure of Caulfield to training, Cranbourne will absorb many of the displaced yards, including aspects of both Mick Price Racing and Ciaron Maher Racing, so the energy and investment into Griffiths’ home-track has been sizeable.

“There’s so much going on here now,” the trainer said. “What they’ve done over a period of years to design the complex has been amazing. It’s the only facility in Australia that doesn’t co-exist with racing, and that in itself has been an unbelievably great decision, and a great vision too.”

Griffiths said his lofty praise was biased, but it’s also hard to argue with him.

Cranbourne has 10 training tracks that range from deep sandhills to traditional turf. There are swimming pools and a stone’s-throw access to four beaches, while the facility is serviced by a highway network out the back gates. All of this is separate to the racecourse itself.

“From limited opportunities, this track has produced winners of nearly every major race in Australia these days, and that’s not considering the high-quality horses that are going to start arriving at Cranbourne now that Mick Price and Ciaron Maher are coming, among others,” Griffiths said.

Co-training with de Kock

On a similar trajectory, Griffiths' own yard has enjoyed an upswing.

In October last year, he welcomed Mathew de Kock into the fold as co-trainer, and the Griffiths de Kock Racing banner has worked seamlessly for the pair ever since. De Kock is just 30 years old, the son of globetrotting South African star trainer Mike de Kock. He brought a fresh approach to the Cranbourne team at a time when Griffiths was particularly low after brain surgery.

“Mat has reinvigorated the business in every way,” Griffiths said. “I’d had a massive lull with health issues, and that was naturally a big scare. It created a crossroads for me where I was wondering if I should slow down and maybe look at a different pathway.”

Griffiths, however, had made a commitment to Mike de Kock to ease Mathew into Australian racing. The younger de Kock had landed on Cranbourne as the best place for him, and Griffiths said it was a real stamp of local approval when de Kock could easily have gone to Dubai or Newmarket.

“Once we worked together, the compatibility was just amazing between us, and so we put the idea on the table to go into co-training,” the trainer said. “We got along like a house on fire and everyone was onboard, and we haven’t looked back.”

The pair had its first runners on Geelong Cup Day last year and, across the sales season this year, they bought 35 yearlings.

“It’s been very good for both us because we are very compatible,” Griffiths said. “We’ve got the ears pricked of existing owners that I’ve trained for for years, because they can see the pep that’s back in my step, and they’ve quickly jumped back into the stable.

“Mathew’s father and international clients have been very happy to support the partnership, and the prizemoney is outstanding in Australia so there’s been some international owners that have been happy to invest from South Africa and America, and so on.

"That support is all around young horses so, when they mature, we’re looking forward to the development of the stable.”