It's easy to see why trainer Lesley Jeffriess was considering retirement for Call Me Brad late last year.
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But now, not so much.
At the close of November in 2020, Call Me Brad's record read 63 starts for six wins and 13 minor placings. The eight-year-old hadn't won a race in over 12 months.
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Fast forward to today and the resurgent gelding has claimed three wins from his last four starts and a place in Friday's Walcha Cup (1440m) beckons.
Jeffriess thought getting down to an easier class helped with Call Me Brad's form turnaround but there's one thing she didn't know the answer to - the gelding's taste for longer races.
"He's never really wanted to go further than 1200 [metres]," Jeffriess said.
"In his early days I tried to get him out to 1200 but he wouldn't run it so 1100 was as far as he wanted to go."
One of Jeffriess' 'little apprentices' has her own hypothesis on Call Me Brad's resurgence.
"My eight-year-old granddaughter [Issy] leads him around everywhere - takes him for a pick of an afternoon - and she thinks because he won at Armidale on Saturday, it was all her doing of course," Jeffriess said.
And Issy has a plan to get the best out of Call Me Brad for the Walcha Cup as well.
"[Before the Armidale races] I'd say 'you gotta give him 100 bites' so she rung me coming home from Armidale and said 'I'm going to give Brad 200 bites tomorrow'," Jeffriess recalled.
Call Me Brad is just one of three horses Jeffriess has at her stables.
The trainer still enjoys her work but has slowed down to put more time into one of her other passions.
"I like to play golf - I'm actually the ladies president. I play two or three days a week and I can do it [play] with three horses. I still go to the track at 4-4.30 and I'm home by 6. I don't have much more to do later in the day unless you go to the races," she said, before adding with a laugh: "And I don't like race days interrupting my golf days."