Stone Cold Chris Austin

Anyway, moving on, I have returned ‘alive’ from Kiribati, after shitting through the eye of the needle for the better part of a week and fighting off some sort of fever over the weekend. A big thanks to Snake for keeping everything running smoothly (or probably better) whilst I was away. I was on Kiritimati (Christmas Island), which is actually an Atoll and about as remote as you can get – just north of the equator on the International date line. But a beautiful place no less. Congrats to all the Collingwood and Penrith fans for your Grand Final wins. Probably the best two finals played in a long long time. And speaking of shitting, it was the umps and Broncos who shat the bed late in both games.

In terms of racing, we saw some quality horse flesh flexing their muscle on the track, beginning with a track record by IMPERATRIZ ($1.70 BSP) in the Moir on Friday night (at Australia’s best track I’ve been informed). This was followed up on Saturday by THINK ABOUT IT ($1.91) in the Premiere Stakes, before JUST FINE ($1.82) put Melbourne Cup markets on notice with another track record in the Metropolitan. There was some value in the other two Group 1’s with TROPICAL SQUALL ($11.79) winning the Flight Stakes and REDIENER ($10.64) taking out the Epsom.

It was always going to be interesting to see how tipsters played this week. Backing the three shorties would’ve got you in the positive, which a few of you did. However, Chris Austin didn’t bother with those, instead he whacked $100 on TROPICAL SQUALL and then had the audacity to put $100 place on SPIRIT RIDGE ($10.46 BSP place) to take home the Round 5 prize with $1725. Chris Mc was second on $1040, with Skinny in third on $737. Note, I will pay out all the round winners this week.

Overall, Austin has taken the lead on $3727.00. Law is second on $3223.75, Freezer third on $2724.30, Wardy 4th on $2541.50 and Saff rounding out the top 5 on $1747.00.

Not to be forgotten, we are also still running the Captain Consistency Award this year. Currently we have joint leaders Saff and Law, who have returned positive results in all five rounds of tipping so far!

Turning our attention to this week, we have just the three races to tip: The Turnbull Stakes, the (Matt) Hill Stakes (a race for fucking numpties no doubt) and the Alan Brown Stakes (whatever that is…). Tips will be open Wednesday afternoon. Until then, Enjoy your week.