Victory in last Saturday’s Team Wealleans Tauranga Classic was another landmark achievement in the rather unusual career of under-rated Cambridge racemare Pop Star Princess.
While she has been ticking off the wins to now boast a tally of 10 and stakes of more than $270,000, in the background has existed what can only be described as a fractured relationship between the quartet who race the bonny racemare, husband-and-wife trainers Fred and Lindsay Cornege and her official owners Pat and Sue Calnan.
The lease arrangement between the two couples expires on the last day of the current season, July 31, after which she will revert to the Calnans. They have owned Pop Star Princess since paying $4,000 for the daughter of former shuttle sire Makfi as a Blandford Lodge-bred weanling at Karaka in the autumn of 2015. Whether her racing career will continue beyond the expiry date of the lease is unknown, however the Corneges are resigned to no longer being involved.
More than two years ago, by which stage Pop Star Princess had already won three of her 14 starts, her career was temporarily derailed by a bizarre incident at their training establishment on the south-eastern outskirts of Cambridge in the early hours of March 24, 2019.
Lindsay Cornege was awoken by their barking dog and after initial investigations by torchlight, she discovered that Pop Star Princess had been removed from her stable and was being loaded on a trailer float. In the time it took for her husband to arrive on the scene, Lindsay was assaulted, but their intervention followed by the arrival of a police contingent ensured that Pop Star Princess did not leave the property.
The overnight altercation forced Pop Star Princess to be scratched from her engagement at that day’s Tauranga race meeting, but fortunately she was unharmed and won at the following Tuesday’s Cambridge trials ahead of two second placings in what remained of her autumn campaign.
Over the past two seasons the tough little bay has gone from strength to strength, adding another seven wins to her record capped by last month’s Gr. 3 Rotorua Stakes and Saturday’s Listed Tauranga Classic. Despite any difficulties that have arisen in the racing partnership, Fred and Lindsay Cornege don’t regret being directly involved with such a genuine galloper.
“When we first heard she was available for lease she had already been to the trials once and to be frank, I wasn’t that impressed by her physically,” recalls Fred. “But I thought being by Makfi, whose daughter Bonneval had just won her first Horse of the Year title – and she was a plain bay too – I figured we should at least give her a go.”
Pop Star Princess won her first two trials the following summer ahead of a debut second in strong three-year-old company at Matamata, splitting the Gr. 2 Eight Carat Classic winner Contessa Vanessa and previous start Gr. 1 Levin Classic winner Age Of Fire. Three weeks later in another age-group sprint at Rotorua, she claimed her first win at the expense of an above average sort in Short Fuse and the budding star Beauden.
Her first black-type was earned later that year when third in the Listed Counties Bowl to star sprinter Bostonian and Railway Stakes winner Santa Monica. Another quality performance was her second, beaten just a head, to classy racemare Supera in last year’s Lisa Chittick Plate at Matamata, and the breakthrough finally came six weeks ago in the Rotorua Stakes when accounting for multiple Group winner Supreme Heights, who had to play second fiddle again at Tauranga last weekend.
“She’s always had the ability, it’s just been a matter of finding the right race for her and then everything falling into place,” says Cornege, whose 28 wins as a trainer over the past decade are dominated by Pop Star Princess’s contribution of 10, including his only two stakes successes. “We have no regrets being her trainers and what she has achieved hasn’t done our profile any harm.
“But as far as what we’ve been through with all the other carry on, a Dick Francis novel would have nothing on it.
“I don’t get emotionally attached to these horses – I take them as I see them – but I’m not sure I could say the same for Lindsay. I just know she’s really going to feel it when the time comes to say goodbye.”
The remaining month of the lease offers just one further black-type opportunity for Pop Star Princess, the Listed Powerworx Opunake Cup at New Plymouth on the penultimate weekend of the season.
“That’s the obvious race to aim for,” added Cornege. “The catch is it’s a handicap and with her rating (100) she’ll have a fair bit of weight to carry, but it is what it is.
“She’ll probably have one run before that when we’ll be able to claim, but we’ll be sticking with Jonathan (Riddell) at New Plymouth. Her two latest wins have been due in a big part to very good rides, and I know at Tauranga on Saturday it meant as much to him as it did to Lindsay and me for her to win like that.”
