A road well travelled – Toole hoping for home stakes success before Swiftie’s Five Diamonds trip

From Kadina on South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula, 150km north west of Adelaide, Kambula Stud’s David Toole is used to spending plenty of time on the road.

As one of the state’s premier thoroughbred breeders, the commerciality and the contraction of his home state’s industry necessitates Toole’s broodmare band heads interstate each spring to be serviced by the country’s leading stallions.

For Toole, that will again be the case in three-and-a-half weeks’ time when the 2026 southern hemisphere breeding season starts on September 1.

Then there’s Swiftie Harriet, a Kambula-bred mare by Exceedance trained by Travis Doudle, who can lay claim to the highways being her second home over the past three months.

For the first time since early May, Swiftie Harriet will race at “home” on Saturday in the Group 3 Behemoth Stakes at Morphettville.

Her return to Adelaide comes after starts at Flemington and three winter placings in Sydney with the Behemoth a probable precursor to another interstate trip being mapped out by Doudle, Toole and the five-year-old mare’s other co-owners.

The consistent Swiftie Harriet, a $120,000 Magic Millions Adelaide graduate out of Tavistock mare Sweet Melody, has to contend with the outside barrier of 13 in the Behemoth in what will be a prelude to the Listed Leon Macdonald Stakes back at Morpettville in a fortnight.

“That’s the one (the Leon Macdonald) that we’re looking at and then the big aim is called the Five Diamonds in Sydney for five-year-olds (on November 7),” Toole told The Straight. 

“Even the lead up to the Five Diamonds is worth $1 million.”

And it is a winter introduction to Sydney racing that Toole is hopeful holds Swiftie Harriet in good stead despite remaining rueful about what could have been.

The mare won more than $70,000 in her Rosehill and Randwick assignments but it could have been so much more.

“She was only ever having two starts in Sydney and her first start she came a very good third,” Toole said. 

“Then at her second start she was home but you could see this horse of Chris Waller’s (Surf’s Up) coming and got us on the line.

“Travis decided to keep her up there to get a win and it was rinse and repeat. 

“The same thing happened, she hit the front, she had the race won, and this horse, because the track was the heavy nine, and she really didn’t like the heavy nine, this horse who loved the heavy (Aroha Stone) came up and beat her.”

In 19 starts, Swiftie Harriet has won three races but also finished runner-up on six occasions. She’s also filled third place three times. 

Although Toole is hoping to have a reason to be in Sydney in early November, more pressing is his focus on the breeding season.

And the mating of Sweet Melody, whose value could be enhanced if the stakes-placed Swiftie Harriet can add to her black-type record, will be chief among his decisions.

She has an unraced three-year-old by Russian Revolution, the Sue Murphy-trained Hasta La Rebellion, and a two-year-old colt by Stay Inside who made $120,000 at the Inglis Premier Yearling Sale in March to the bid of Buckland Farm.

Toole was told that the colt could reappear at this year’s New Zealand Bloodstock Ready to Run Sale.