Pacing sensation Kingman is lucky to be alive.
Just hours before his fighting second to champion Leap To Fame in last night’s epic Group 1 Cranbourne Cup, the float transporting Kingman and star stablemates Eye Keep Smiling and Steno from Shepparton to Cranbourne burst into flames.
Fortunately, just moments before, the horses has been pulled from the float on the side of the Hume Highway.
The float was engulfed in flames, completely destroyed and the Hume Highway closed to traffic.
“We’re still not exactly sure what it was,” Kingman’s trainer-driver Luke McCarthy said.
“Nathan (Jack) and I were driving along and heard a long bang. We thought it was a puncture so pulled over and then we saw smoke coming out everywhere.
“Then I saw some flames and said to Nathan ‘quick, we’ve gotta get the horses out’.
“Just minutes after we got all four horses out, the whole thing went up in flames.
“I’ve never been involved in anything like it before and I’m sure I never will again.
“It was scary and could have been catastrophic.”
McCarthy, Jack and the four horses were stranded on the side of the freeway for almost an hour.
“An old guy who lived nearby and saw the smoke, drove around to us in his big old horse float and offered to take us back to his place with the horses,” he said,
“I told him they were racehorses and all racing in a few hours at Cranbourne, so he said just take the float and bring it back when you’re finished with it.
“He was just amazing. I drove the float back to him today. It’s the oldest float you’d see but it did the job.
“The first thing was getting the horses to a safer place than the side of a freeway and without him, we’d never have made the races in time.
“That upside of scary moments is like this is how you see the good things come out in people.”
Kingman, winner of the Group 1 NZ and Victoria Cups late last year, ran a close second to champion Leap To Fame in the $150,000 Cranbourne Cup.
Eye Keep Smiling, Australia’s top racemare, ran second to the emerging Captains Mistress in track record time in the Group 3 Angelique.
“You can’t believe they raced, let alone ran so well, after what they’d been through,” McCarthy said.
“It was confronting enough for Nathan and I, let alone the horses.”
McCarthy said Kingman, who has beaten Leap To Fame in three of their five clashes, would now have a well deserved week off and skip next Saturday night’s $150,000 Group 1 Kilmore Cup.
“Yes, he can go straight to the Hunter Cup in two weeks now,” he said.
“That’s a silver lining from a night you’d never want again. If he’d won at Cranbourne, we’d have felt compelled to go to Kilmore because he’d still be chasing the $1 million bonus.
“But now he can have this week off and I’m sure he’ll be a different horse when he meets Leap To Fame again in the Hunter Cup.”
· Adam Hamilton is a paid contributor writing on harness racing for News Corp.
