Deb dresses her latest ‘Copy’ weanling in white and he delivers a Major coup

Owner Debbie Green must have known something was up when she bought a new shadow roll and saddle pad for Major Copy before his winning run at Cambridge on Friday night.

The two-year-old trained in a black shadow roll during the week, gear designed to stop him seeing tyre marks on the track which prevented him from showing his best on debut.

But, knowing her eyesight wasn’t that good, Green kitted her little horse out in white for racenight, adding a white shadow roll, white saddle pad and white and black hopples.

“I can never see my horses properly and with all the rain I still couldn’t really see him,” Green said after the weather packed in at Cambridge.

“I couldn’t really see what was happening. I was watching Maurice’s white helmet and didn’t think he was going to get off the markers but then my friend Rebecca suddenly started screaming ‘he’s coming, he’s coming’.

“I only really saw him flashing past the post and then we were jumping up and down like rabbits.

“When you buy them as weanlings and they do things like that, it’s a real buzz.”

Debbie Green does it again with Major Copy.Major Copy is the latest in a growing line of weanling buys that Green has enjoyed success with, including millionaires Copy That ($7000) and Hard Copy ($4500) and fine performers like Debbie Lincoln ($3500) and My Copy ($3000).

Mostly due to their success, she was able to spend $13,000 to secure Major Copy, after he was passed in at New Zealand Bloodstock’s 2024 weanling sale at Karaka.

By long time successful sire Art Major, he was out of 11-race winner Delightful Dash - but the pedigree was only secondary for Green.

“I buy them on type. I don’t think I’ve ever owned an Art Major. We could never afford an Art Major or Bettor’s Delight. We always had to buy ones by obscure stallions or ones not in vogue.

“It’s thanks to our success with cheapies that we could pay two or three times as mush as usual.

“He was a typical Art Major, very pretty, and I didn’t pay much attention to his pedigree.”

How Major Copy looked as a weanling, a typical “pretty” Art Major.None of Delightful Dash’s first three foals amounted to anything but third dam Krystle produced speedy mare Foreal (18 wins, $A664,800), who in turn left My Field Marshal (29 wins, $A1.49 million), who won the 2018 Miracle Mile in a record 1:46.9.

Major Copy has yet to show that brand of speed but Green’s husband Ray and his training partner at Lincoln Farms, Nathan Delany, knew he had ability.

“It’s always a good sign when Ray says he likes one after driving him in training. If he comes home and says ‘I don’t know about this one, Deb’, that’s when you worry.

“He’d also shown a bit of pep out of the gate at the trials and after Maurice gave me that little smile of his before the race and said he’d see what he could do from one, I got a little hopeful.

“I always leave it to Maurice, he schools our horses beautifully.”

Hopes that Major Copy might lead were soon crushed when Arose flew the arm to take over and after her driver David Butcher handed up to Midnight Betty, McKendry found himself buried three deep.

But as Green put it, “sneaky Maurice” managed to push his way out before the final turn and, despite being forced four wide by Jessie Lincoln, the colt unleashed a strong run to beat his older stablemate by three-quarters of a length.

Ray Green described Major Copy as “a lovely colt.”

“It’s hard to know how far he’ll take us but he’s well above average.

“It wasn’t a stellar bunch that he beat but I think he will go on with it. He’d had only one workout and two trials so there’s a lot of improvement to come.”