By the time the Australian-bred champion known as Winx retired in 2019, she’d had the best racing career Australia had ever seen and had earned a reputation as the world’s best mare and the fastest racehorse on the planet. Her earnings totaled a staggering $26,451,175, more than any other racehorse in Australian history and $10 million more than the next horse in the earnings stakes, Redzel.
If Winx was in the running, it’s fair to say that the best tip for online sports betting was to put your money on her. You can gauge the status of this beloved champion by the fact that she even has a horse race named after her: The Warwick Stakes was renamed the Winx Stakes in her honor in 2018. Let’s take a closer look at Winx’s outstanding achievements and the secret that made her unbeatable.
A legendary horse racing career
Winx was foaled on September 14, 2011, at Coolmore Farm in Jerrys Plains, New South Wales, Australia. (Her mother was called Vegas Showgirl, a great casino horse racing name!) Bred by John Camilleri’s Fairway Thoroughbreds, she was sold for the not particularly special price of $230,000 as a yearling at the 2013 Magic Millions Gold Coast Sale. Her new owners were Magic Bloodstock Racing (Peter Tighe), Richard Treweeke and Debbie Kepitis. Little did they know that their young mare’s career would be one for the ages.
Winx’s performance during her first two seasons didn’t give much indication that she would become Australia’s undisputed favorite champion with the best horse racing betting odds. She did win her debut race on June 4, 2014, at Warwick Racetrack and two more races in a row, but things went flat after that and she only had a single win in her next seven starts. And then the brakes came off. From 2015 to 2019, Winx won her next 33 races. She eclipsed Phar Lap’s record of 14, put Black Caviar’s all-time record of 25 in the shade and retired with an unsurpassed career total of 37 wins out of 42 starts.
Winx’s biggest wins along the way included the most prestigious horse racing tournaments in Australia, such as the Phar Lap Stakes, Epsom Handicap, Queensland Oaks, Apollo Stakes (three victories) and Queen Elizabeth Stakes (three victories.) Then there was the $5 million W.S. Cox Plate, the most prestigious weight-for-age race Down Under, which Winx won four times: a first in the history of horse racing betting.
Honors and awards
As a result of these incredible achievements, Winx received a number of prestigious awards over the years. She won Australian Horse of the Year and Australian Champion Middle Distance Racehorse four years in a row, from 2015 to 2019. She was crowned World’s Top-Ranked Turf Horse from 2016 to 2017 and scooped the sought-after Secretariat Vox Populi Award in 2018.
On May 17, 2017, Winx was inducted into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame, becoming only the third horse ever to do so while still racing. (Sunline and Black Caviar, the other two inductees, are also mares.)
Other ways that Australia has honored Winx include naming a grade one stake after her and issuing her own Australia Post stamp. The grandstand at the Royal Randwick racecourse is now called the Winx Grandstand and there are iconic statues of her at the Moonee Valley and Rosehill Gardens tracks. In 2018, Carlton & United Breweries released commemorative Winx beer cans in 2018, and fans can even buy models of the legendary mare to put in their homes.
What made Winx an all-time winner
What was the secret of Winx’s success? Dr. Graeme Putt, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, did some research into the champion sprinter. What he found turned conventional horse racing thinking on its head.
Before Winx, the horse racing odds would favor the horse with the biggest stride. The stride length of great racehorses such as Black Caviar and Phar Lap was close to 28 feet. Winx’s stride length, by contrast, averaged a moderate 23 to 23.5 feet. But what Winx lacked in length, she made up for in stride rate, also known as “cadence.” According to Dr. Putt, Winx could put in 2.7 strides per second, whereas other horses could only put in 2.3 on average. Another way to put it is that Winx could maintain a pace of 14 footfalls every five seconds compared to her rivals’ average of 12.
In practical terms, this means that Winx could move 170 lengths in a minute, more than 20% above the 140 lengths that most other horses can move. What was also remarkable about Winx is that when she wanted to, she could lengthen her stride to up to 24.58 feet – a whole foot longer than her average length and slightly longer than NYRA champion Secretariat’s 24.3 feet. This allowed her to close late in a race, seemingly without effort, time after time.
In the words of Dr. Putt, “The extraordinary ability Winx has is her ability to change stride length and frequency at will that her current rivals don’t have. This means she can settle or accelerate at any time during a race. I think this makes her unique.”
If Winx’s career is anything to go by, it seems that it’s a good horse racing betting tip to keep an eye on your favorite’s stride length and stride rate alike. Of course, winning horse races also takes a tremendous amount of character. As Winx’s trainer Chris Waller put it, “When I see her, I see a normal horse, but I then can see that inside that horse there is a determination to rise to every challenge. I see a sense of purpose in her when she goes about her job. I have said from the very start, she is a very serious horse!”
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