It’s no picnic winning at Hanging Rock, even for a hometown boy like Mick Cornish, who now calls Echuca home.
The Kyneton and Hanging Rock Racing Club hold just two meetings a year — New Year’s Day and the Australia Day public holiday. Cornish has had more than a few runners on the track but has never been lucky enough to have one lead the field across the line. That all changed on Monday afternoon, when the Cornish Gaskin training tandem’s five-year-old Extreme Torque took out the $25,000 Hanging Rock Cup.
While Cornish has had many winners in his training career, he admits this one means quite a bit.
“It’s good to go back to your home town and pick up the cup,” he said. “I’ve run second in the race a few times, but have never been able to steal it, so it is pretty special to finally have a winner in the race now. “He had a great run, especially since his racing pattern isn’t really suited to the course. But he’s a hard finisher, he was able to drop out and storm home over the top to get the win.” Extreme Torque made the charge late to take out the race by a length and a half.
It’s a second win in two months for the gelding, who picked up a victory at Seymour on November 24, before starting a stretch of runs in the city, including Flemington and Caulfield.
“His form has been pretty solid of late,” Cornish said. “He’s been running well in the bigger races, but hasn’t been getting the prize money, so we decided it would be a good idea to bring him back to country level and freshen him up.
“We were lucky Hanging Rock turned out to be the perfect run for him to get the win.”
While the decision was made to bring him back to country racing, Cornish expects it will only be a temporary switch.
“He’s been competitive in town, and we believe that he’s going to be a city class staying galloper in time,” he said. “But he’s still very young in terms of being a stayer. He can obviously compete and run really well against this kind of competition in country racing with his experience. “It was a good chance to really show the class he has.”
The win continues a strong stretch for the Cornish Gaskin stables. “We’ve had a pretty good run of late,” he said.
“We started the season off a bit slowly, but we started to pick up in the last months of the year. We had a win at Cranbourne and at Werribee in the last two weeks to go with the win at Hanging Rock, so we are starting to get some real momentum as a stable.
“We have some handy winter runners in the stable, so as we get into those months we should be able to continue to have success to finish off the season.”
