Alannah Logie is the granddaughter of Hazel and Don Logie and will gear Lady Lani in the race named in her late grandfather’s honour on Saturday night at Kilmore.
The 2023 Don Logie Memorial Pace is part of a special night of metropolitan racing at Kilmore, including memorial races in honour of Bob Cain, Leli and Mary Mifsud, Vin and Bob Knight and Roger Reeves.
Logie said the chance to compete with the horse who gave her a first training win meant the world.
“It’s one of those nights that it’s emotional, it gives me chills just to think about how much my family had to do with Kilmore racing as a community and as a club,” Logie said. “They just put their whole lives into it.”
Don was a long-standing volunteer of Kilmore as a club steward and timekeeper, while Hazel bred and raced multiple horses with her brother Bob Knight.
The most notable of those was Jodies Babe, whose 1989 Inter Dominion win is still the last time a mare won the race. The spoils of that success is still being drawn on today.
“With the facilities, even the dam that we’ve got at the back, Bob and Vinnie (Knight) used to ride the horses in and swim them,” she said.
Lady Lani, who is owned in partnership with Logie’s mother Gaye, was purchased out of Western Australia and provided the young trainer her first win.
On a night where four races are named after her relatives, Logie said it would be very special to add a further win.
“I’ve got a lot of horses and love them so much, but this horse I just have a real special bond with. There couldn’t be a more fitting horse in my Grandpa’s race than her.”
LISTEN TO THE FULL INTERVIEW WITH TOBY MCKINNON ON TROTSLIFE:
Bradley Barnes joined Trotslife on April 5, the day after Rocknroll Walla won his third start in his third racing preparation.
Wind the clock forward to present day and Barnes, who trains horses in partnership with his dad David, lines up the emerging stable star Rocknroll Walla in just his 10th start in the Ken Snowy Chapman Memorial Winter Championship first heat at Kilmore on Saturday.
“He curbed a hock and had a couple of issues previously as a yearling. He is a really big horse, quite heavy, and he had to have an OCD hock surgery when he was a yearling.”
Osteochondritis dissecans (OCD) is a type of skeletal maturation problem that affects joint cartilage and often involves the subchondral bone just beneath the cartilage surface. The cause of OCD has generally been considered a defect in bone mineralization at the joint surface.
With the time Rocknroll Walla has been given, what heights he will reach from the potential he shows is unknown.
“We don’t really know what sort of scope he has got, I’d like to think that he could get to Melton and be a consistent Melton horse for a period of time.”
