Racing: Triple Crown is the target as Kazzia battles for Dettori

It was a sporting day for yeoman and steadfast performances, from Sapporo to here on the Surrey Downs, where Frankie Dettori emerged from teasing his fellow jockeys in the weighing room with considerable vocal support for Argentina to drive Kazzia to a resolute victory in the Oaks.

There are pretty Classic successes and others which inspire with the nature of their winning. Kazzia's display sits wholly in the second category and she will go down as one of the few horses to have collected a Classic in the hardest way imaginable, all the way from the front.

With a 1,000 Guineas and now an Oaks in the locker, Kazzia will ultimately test her unquestionable mettle in the harshest of furnaces in the autumn of this season when she takes on the colts and a further extension in distance in the St Leger.

For now, though, her Godolphin keepers can reflect on a job well done, a job accomplished on turf just as it had been planned with chalk and blackboard.

Any jockeys who had nurtured hopes of an easy race in which to protect their mounts were immediately and rudely disabused when the stalls flapped open yesterday. Dettori immediately signalled intent when he forced Kazzia to the front, the big momma leading her smaller counterparts like a pen in front of cygnets.

There were those that had a try, notably the winner's market rival, Islington, who indeed look a significant danger on the entrance to the straight. Kieren Fallon's mount paid an exhausting price for such impertinence, though, fading quickly into eighth.

Kazzia was tacked over to the nearside rail with a decisive advantage until one final challenger emerged from the pack. Ireland's Quarter Moon remorselessly cut into the lead, slowly bridging the substantial gap.

This private chase became so intense that the pair eventually drew 14 lengths clear of the third horse, Shadow Dancing. Quarter Moon came close, to within half a length, but Kazzia was a just winner, an admirable winner.

"I wanted to make sure that everybody had a race even before they got to me," Dettori reported. "After I had beaten off Islington I was about three or four lengths clear with two furlongs to go, but she was getting pretty tired in the last 50 yards and there was not a lot of petrol left in the tank. I had been very positive on her and maybe I had pressed the accelerator a bit too hard, a bit too soon. I was confident until the last 50 yards, but the winning post came in time."

It was a ninth British Classic for Dettori, his third Oaks, and the eighth anniversary of when he won his first Classic, here in similar conditions atop Balanchine.

Quite appropriately, the Kazzia story took a major shift in the Italian city of Milan, where Dettori was born, at a time when she was being trained in Germany. "We owe a big debt to Slickly, because it was when he won the Premio Vittorio di Capua in Milan last year that we first saw this filly," Sheikh Mohammed, the head of Godolphin, said. "She won a race on the same card that day and I was really impressed with the way she did it. I liked her a lot and we bought her after the race. I did not know anything about her before that day."

"It was the big ears," Simon Crisford, the Godolphin racing manager added, "and the general look of power about her."

The Sheikh has bought many horses for big money, not all of them with commensurate success, but in the winners' circle yesterday he had the satisfied demeanour of a man whose judgement had been proved correct. Now he can look forward to the repetition of a feat achieved by only the few. Sheikh Mohammed won the fillies' Triple Crown in his own maroon and white livery with Oh So Sharp in 1985. Once again he has been blessed with a filly of varied talents and the quest is on for the third leg on Town Moor in the autumn.