Trainer Ben Ahrens aiming to bounce back from recent floods to win Beaudesert Cup

IT’S not the black-type race trainer Ben Ahrens wanted for My Little Flicka but he will be happy to win the Beaudesert Cup at his home track today.

My Little Flicka winning at Doomben. Photo: Grant Peters, Trackside Photography.

IT’S not the black-type race trainer Ben Ahrens wanted for My Little Flicka but he will be happy to win the Beaudesert Cup at his home track today.

The 1400m Cup was always part of Ahrens’ back-up plan should he not get his six-year-old mare back to her peak in the wake of the Beaudesert floods in March.

Ahrens was left to foot a $70,000 bill for flood damage, which also severely hampered My Little Flicka’s training with the winter carnival looming.

Video courtesy of Racing Queensland

Despite the setback, he said My Little Flicka was running well enough to win his first Beaudesert Cup today with Ben Cornell aboard.

“She seems to be fine,” he said of the mare who has won seven of her 29 starts.

“She has come through her last few runs with no dramas so hopefully back on her home track and a dryish track we will look at running a much-improved race.

“The race was only sitting in the back of my mind.

“We had hoped to get her some black-type with her this preparation but ever since we had the flooding out here we ended up behind schedule.

“We ended up running into some wet tracks because she needed to run to get her fit for those other races. In the end it just didn’t pan out.

“This was a bit of a consolation really heading this way.

“If we missed out on those mares races, we had the Beaudesert Cup in mind.”

Ahrens said he was only now getting back to a routine at his Epsom Lodge base after the floods.

“We were pretty badly ­affected,” Ahrens said.

“We had water right through the middle of the property. We didn’t lose any buildings or anything like that but we lost about eight paddocks and all the fences got knocked down.

“We lost about 200m of training track that we ended up having to rip up and I think it was about $15,000 worth of sand back on the track.

“It was probably up around the $60,000 to $70,000 mark it cost us and all of that uninsured of course because of the flooding.

“It knocked us around a little bit but we getting along fine now.”

Ahrens finished second in the Beaudesert Cup in 2009 with Naniwa.

“I’ve always wanted to win the Beaudesert Cup with it being basically my home track and the biggest race at Beaudesert,” Ahrens said.