No Excuse Maggie Headlines Top Day

13 October 2012

WS graduate No Excuse Maggie capped a grand day for the Matamata farm with a dominant victory in the Gr.3 Taranaki Breeders’ Stakes at Hawera this afternoon. They grey mare bolted away with the day’s feature to go with her Listed Matamata Cup success of 12 months ago.

The John Bary-trained six-year-old is a daughter of resident sire No Excuse Needed whose daughter I Do had earlier won for the stud and trainer Allan Sharrock.

“I’m not sure what we’ll do with her now,” Bary said. “She seems to have come through the race really well, but we’ll get her home and then decide where to next. I had been quite confident as she’d been working well and when the rain came that really played into our hands.”

From the family of the Group One winners Glamour Puss and Vision And Power, No Excuse Maggie has now won six races and nearly $170,000.

Leading New Zealand first season sire title in 2006-07 and champion two-year-old sire in 2007-08, No Excuse Needed stands at $6000 + GST.

As embodied by No Excuse Maggie, the cross of No Excuse Needed over O’Reilly mares has resulted in a superb ratio of 73% winners-to-runners, 15.4 stakes winners-to-runners and with the multiple Gr.1 winner Daffodil.

Savabeel, from furthering a legacy to creating his own – The Straight

A true Australasian success story on the track and in the breeding shed, the influence of Savabeel, who died last week aged 24, will be felt for years to come on both sides of the …

23 June 2026

Sav’s final resting place

“I’ve got a couple of very special bottles of wine that I’ve had for a number of years, and usually they would have been opened on a celebration, but I thought it was very pertinent, and well, it was a celebration, it was a celebration of his life,” Mark Chittick told The Straight.