Anotherdanceforme ready to whirl on bigger stages.
Horses running for illustration only. Picture: Clive Rose/Getty Images
It’s long overdue for a really good racehorse to emerge from the Eastern Cape to dominate on the national stage. Dare we hope we have one in the shape of Anotherdanceforme?
The four-year-old filly won Sunday’s Algoa Cup (Listed) at Fairview – a race referred to over the years as “the PE July”. Of course, many decent horses have won an event that dates back more than a century, with some of them even going on to win big races in bigger centres – Hill Fifty Four and Dunford, for example.
What marked out this weekend’s performance as special – and a potential omen of greater things to come – was that it was Anotherdanceforme’s 13th win from 15 starts and she broke the 2000m Polytrack course record by a whopping 1.45 seconds.
(Another interesting statistic: it was trainer Alan Greeff’s first Algoa Cup victory. For a man who has dominated Eastern Cape racing for decades, taking the regional championship 17 times, the gap seemed incredible. Perhaps that, too, augurs well for a special season for the gentleman of Halo Stables.)
Greeff and us have seen grand hopes and dreams arise in Nelson Mandela Bay before. And there’s been some success, such as a memorable triumph of the trainer’s juvenile filly Golden Palm in the Grade 1 Douglas Whyte Stakes at Greyville in 2025.
In the same year, Greeff campaigned an exceptional colt called My Best Shot in the KwaZulu-Natal winter season after a string of 10 wins back home at Fairview.
My Best Shot did well, finishing less than 10 lengths off The Real Prince in a rough race in the Hollywoodbets Durban July. Back on home turf, he was a close second in the very same Algoa Cup, before taking the unsettling trip north for the Betway Summer Cup in Joburg and coming unstuck in another trainwreck of a contest won by 100-1 roughie Mocha Blend.
With Mocha Blend being a filly, there might be a smidgeon of surprise that Greeff hasn’t entered high-stepping Anotherdanceforme in this year’s Summer Cup in late-November.
Perhaps her ornery temperament means she is unsuited to long-distance travel. At Sunday’s winner circle celebrations, connections had fulsome praise for Halo work rider Xola Jacobs, who gets the hot-headed lass into a racing frame of mind.
Eastern Cape is generally looked down on as the “weakest” racing province, mainly stabling horses that can’t quite make it in the bigger cities. Most runners are indeed hand-me-downs; though many of them gain a new lease on competitive life in their new surroundings and become multiple winners and even local legends.
Increasingly though, prominent owners like Anotherdanceforme’s Peter Moor are buying expensive, well-bred thoroughbreds directly for brilliant PE trainers such as Greeff and neighbours Dean Smith, Kelly Mitchley, Jacques Strydom, Sharon Kotzen and others.
It seems it’s only a matter of time…
