The $500,000 Listed Ballarat Cup (2000m) on Saturday was won by quality five year-old gelding Berkeley Square, a homebred for renowned South Australian breeder David Peacock that was raised at Mill Park.
Trained by Dan O’Sullivan and ridden by Jaylah Kennedy, the son of Territories (IRE) scored a popular home town win in the race taking his overall record to eight wins and eight placings from 26 starts with prizemoney of $1.6million.
With Luke Nolen sidelined through injury Jaylah Kennedy got a late call up and proved up for the challenge.
"Just bloody brilliant. For lots of reasons, just for the horse, for Jaylah. A lot of support here today. We backed the horse, we backed ourselves, we backed him up. And he got the job done,” said Dan O’Sullivan.
"I must admit, I was watching Jaylah pretty carefully going to barriers, and I mentioned to Luke (Nolen), it was Luke's idea to really contemplate backing the horse up into this race. I thought with Luke sitting at home, he could have been on the horse doing the same job.
"Credit to Jaylah, she took up the reins last night. And Barry too, she said she wasn't going to the fence. And she rode it out perfectly and timed her run to the minute."
A Group II winenr at three and multiple SW, Berkeley Square is the best of three winners from budding blue hen Bahamas and all of her winners are stakes-winners with Berkeley Square joined by Group winners Senor Toba and Angel Capital.
Bahamas has foaled this spring producing a colt by Blue Point (IRE).
