Promising Bruno rides a Platinum winner

Promising Bruno rides a Platinum winner

Hugely promising Brazilian jockey Bruno Queiroz rode Platinum Diamonds to win the feature race at the Ōtaki-Māori Matariki meeting last week, the $80,000 John Turkington Castletown Stakes.

Bruno, 23, left his native Brazil to ride for Kiwi trainer Stephen Gray when he was based in Singapore. In May this year he teamed up again with Stephen, who is now back in New Zealand training at Rongotea.

Bruno has already gained considerable international experience, winning two champion jockey titles in Rio de Janeiro, and he’s already ridden more than 1100 career winners. He’s has been described as a talented jockey with a big future.

His godfather is internationally renowned jockey Joao Moreira.

It hasn’t taken him long to settle in New Zealand either, with 13 wins from 76 rides, earning more than $330,000 in stakemoney. A jockey’s cut is 5 percent.

Bruno was full of praise for the effort of Platinum Diamonds.

“She is a lovely horse to ride. I just sat in behind them, and moved up on the inside along the rail, which at that stage she was just cruising,” he says. “As we turned into the straight, and still travelling well, we then got a gap at about the 300m mark and we went through and she responded very well, and
raced away comfortably and won easing down at
the line by about a length.”

Awapuni trainer Lisa Latta says she hadn’t decided yet on where the daughter of Hello Youmzain would head next.

“She’s a lovely filly to train, she just keeps going forward in the right direction, and just keeps improving,” she  says. “We’ll just wait and see how she pulls up today to see where we head to next.”

Earlier on the programme, Pipers Son won the Foxton Cup ridden by Elle Sole and trained at Stratford by Tony Dravitski, who also shares in the ownership.

Meanwhile, Ōtaki -Māori chief executive Ben Jamison said the crowd numbers were well up on previous years and the track held up well after staging extra meetings last year when Trentham, Awapuni and Hastings were out of action.

 “We had a lot of racing,” he says.

There was also an incident in May this year when vandalism had caused a meeting to be postponed.

“We’d never experienced that before, and I wouldn’t wish that on any club, that’s for sure,” he says.