Sport
23 February, 2024
Pacer chasing Tasmania Cup bliss
MODERN Bliss will make a tilt for the Tasmania Pacing Cup this Sunday. The 12-year-old owned by Jarklin’s Graham Maxted goes into the the cup heat at Hobart after a career 21st win at Terang last weekend. Trained by Ash Wharton, Modern Bliss...
MODERN Bliss will make a tilt for the Tasmania Pacing Cup this Sunday.
The 12-year-old owned by Jarklin’s Graham Maxted goes into the the cup heat at Hobart after a career 21st win at Terang last weekend.
Trained by Ash Wharton, Modern Bliss started at odds of $4 and enjoyed the run of the race behind the leader and $2.15 favourite Highway To Heaven before sprinting home to win by 3.5 metres from Delightful Major.
The mile rate of 2:00.04 was the best winning time recorded by Modern Bliss this season. Wharton, who is leasing the pacer from Maxted, had young reinswoman Annalise Scott in the sulky for Modern Bliss’s 2180-metre drive to victory.
The win took career prizemoney for the horse to $191,834 after his first win of the year in six starts and the first since last December when claiming the Elmore Pacing Cup raced at Bendigo.
Modern Bliss completed a trifecta for the Geelong-based Wharton on Sunday after he trained a winner at the Bendigo gallops meeting and then in the evening with Morvah streeting home in the first leg of his double at Terang.
Modern Bliss’s Terang success has added to Wharton’s reputation working with aged horses.
“He is safe from the stand and we will give him a crack at a heat of the Tasmania Cup,” he said of the pacing evergreen.
“I try to find horses that have run well in the past and have lost form for some reason and its often just a change of scenery that brings them back,” he said.