An Ode to those great veterans that say goodbye to the game.

I am going to pay my respects to a single horse in this memorial, however, in the words and meaning you can find many, many great old horses that have raced the best part of a decade at HRP and are then left as forgotten and fading pixels in the ether of memory.
Let’s Do It Big Boy retired after a brave effort in a $50.000 claimer at SAR on the 3rd of September just 4 months shy of his tenth birthday. It is harsh to see that last effort as the culmination of a career that started in 2016 and ended after 73 races and two grade one wins, four grade two’s and three grade three’s, He won’t be remembered as the greatest nine year old to find the steep downward life curve but many will remember him as one of those horses that were always there, that you always had to fear if he turned up in your race and would always run his heart out.

It all started back in 2016 with a very nice debut run at BTP where he finished second. The horse that won that day, in ironic contrast, lasted just 13 months and 6 races before he found a gun pressed to his head. Unlike many of those horses, we find racing long into their old age he actually won two from three as a two-year-old and was showing ability right out of the gate, in fact, he ran his first stakes race on his sixth start. Another ‘ode to the old days’ was that he only ran one dirt race and one sprint with every other start coming in turf routes. Today, of course, we see 12-furlong winners, winning their next race in a five-furlong sprint and horses switching between turf and dirt at will, it may be the development of the game that has brought us to this but in this great horse’s career we see the sort of reality we experienced in bygone days.

I won’t be detailing every one of the 73 starts that this horse ran but his record of 14 wins and 50% ITM finishes is quite remarkable when you see the level he had raced at his entire life. The highlights of his career and probably his best ever run of results came at the ripe old age of eight when he won the Fourstardave Handicap, The WO Mile and then only failed by a nose to beat Great Bonkers in the BC Mile.
He was never to win a Breeders Cup race but will be known as one of the best horses not to and his BC record in itself speaks volumes, third in the BC Turf in 2018, fifth in 2019, fourth in 2021 and then of course nearly winning the BC Mile last year.

Lets Do It Big Boy won’t be remembered as the best horse to ever run at HRP, but he is one of the most honest and consistent. His trainer picked him up in 2018 for $125.000, a big investment for one of our smaller stables. RNP Stables has been here since 2004 and in many ways found a career that is very similar to that of his great old stable star. The fact is the two of them were perfectly matched, and I know that he will be sorely missed in a stable that may never see another one like him.

So as the pixels of Lets Do It Big Boy flutter into electronic heaven let’s all take a moment to remember all the great old horses and in particular this one.