Picture: Gary Alexander being interviewed after winning a race at Murray Bridge today (via racing.com). 

Former Turffontein stalwart trainers Gary And Dean Alexander had a winner yesterday at Murray Bridge in Australia. 

Five-year-old mare Eminencia (I Am Invincible) was having her fourth start for the Alexanders and won a Benchmark 58 Handicap over 1400m under another ex-pat South African, Barend Vorster.

Eminencia got up to win by a neck.

The Alexanders arrived in Australia midway through last year. 

They are based at Murray Bridge, a state of the art training and racing centre in the village of Gifford Hill, which is 75km from Adelaide in South Australia.

In the 2021/2022 season, their first in Australia, they only had 26 runners for two wins (7.7%) and six places (30.8%).

However, it is picking up a bit now as they have already had seven runners in the first month of the new season for one winner (14.3%) and three places (57.1%).

The brothers had expected a slow start because they were going to build up their string from scratch chiefly by attending sales, so must of their horses must be unraced youngsters.

Gary and Dean, while training out of Turffontein for more than four decades, had made many friends and contacts in Australasia as regular buyers at the Australian and New Zealand Sales.

They were known and greeted out there as “the Alexander brothers”, so should go from strength to strength just as they did in Johannesburg where they at one stage were stabling 160 horses.