Runaway Again. Did Just That.

FORT ERIE, Ont.

Runaway Again has quirks.

And jockey Ryan Munger gets them.

“You’ve got to be so kind to him,” said Munger, who piloted Runaway Again to an upset win over King’s Plate winner Mansetti, just when it looked as if the 8 to 5 favourite had things all sewn up in the $400,000 Prince of Wales Stakes.

“You’ve got to treat him like your wife or your girlfriend,” Munger said,.

Runaway Again has always been a handful. A little unpredictable. He sometimes lives up to his name. Trainer Sid Attard doesn’t mind because he always knew Runaway Again was a runner. That helps him put up with a bit of silliness. That’s part of his job.

Runaway Again had started only once before he tackled the king’s Plate, but that start was a 9 ½ length win in a maiden race. Munger rode.

Munger didn’t ride Runaway Again in the Plate because he found himself with an embarrassment of riches: he had also won the Plate Trial impressively with Sedbury’s Ghost. And he just had to stick to the Barb Minshall train.

Attard got U.S. name jockey Javier Castellano to ride him in the Plate, but the gelding finished 10^th.

Attard now figures it was just too much to ask of an inexperienced gelding in only his second start to tackle Canada’s best at 1 ¼ miles. But immediately after the Plate, he pushed for Runaway Again to run in the second jewel of the Canadian Triple Crown, the slightly shorter 1 3/16ths mile Prince of Wales Stakes. He told owner Frank Stronach that he thought he had a shot.

Stronach said: “Go for it.”

Don’t forget that Awesome Again had only two previous starts in his life when Stronach started him in the 1997 Queen’s Plate. A couple of weeks before the Plate, he didn’t even have a name. Awesome Again eventually won the Breeders’ Cup Classic in an epic contest.

Attard was ecstatic that Munger agreed to ride Runaway Again in the Prince of Sales. That, he figured, was another part of the puzzle. And so the die was cast, with Runaway Again making only the third start of his life.

And ending up as the second-longest shot on the board at 8 to 1.

And don’t forget that Fort Erie is rather like Saratoga: its premier race has long served as a graveyard of favourites.

Remember New Pro Escar in 1971? He was a longshot that left a stacked field in the dust – a field that included Kennedy Road and Belle Geste.

If you don’t remember that morsel, then the epic biggie is Benburb’s energetic defeat of 1 to 9 much-heralded favorite Alydeed in the 1992 Prince of Wales. “No one will beat this horse unless he falls down,” one trainer said before the race. Benburb was a 24 to 1 shot, and then he went on to deliver an even bigger upset in the Molson Export Million, when he defeated A.P. Indy.

There’s also Le Cinquieme Essai in 2002. The local horse went off at 7 to 1 as the only horse that had previously raced at Fort Erie.

Dig deeply into Prince of Wales archives – they are seriously hard to find – and you see that the longest priced winner in the race history was Coryphee in 1987. He returned $112.80 for a $2 bet.  All of the U.S. newspapers touted Benburb as the biggest upset in Canadian history. (It always reads well). Coryphee hadn’t run in the Queen’s Plate, won by Market Control. But Coryphee evaded detection.

As he had in the Plate, the flop-eared Mansetti set the pace, but he was heartily pressured almost all of the way by Scorching, a 7 to 2 shot, and then also by Ashley’s Archer, a Mark Casse colt that had been 13^th in the Plate and had won one race. They skipped along quickly, with 23.12 to the first quarter, 46.96 to the half, 1:10.76 to the three-quarters – a much faster pace than in the King’s Plate to this point – and a mile in 1:36.87.

Runaway Again settled in quietly on the rail, just behind the charging front-runners. Right in behind Mansetti.

Mansetti shook those two loose at the head of the homestretch, and appeared headed to victory and a shot at being a Triple Crown winner. He put some distance between him and the field. But then suddenly jockey Pietro Moran went to the whip.

Runaway Again impertinently loomed. And in the final surging strides, he suddenly and quickly went past the leader to win by half a length in 1:55.64. It looked even more dramatic, because in the final strides, under pressure, Mansetti had switched to the wrong lead and lost momentum.

“Things worked out perfect,” Munger said. “Most races you go through in your mind, but they don’t go that way. But today, the way I visualized it, the race worked out exactly.”

To be honest, both Munger and trainer Sid Attard thought Runaway Again was heading for a second-place finish. But then “I saw Mansetti starting to tread water,” Munger said. “I know prior to the King’s Plate, there were a lot of stamina doubts about him. And I thought we could actually get there.”

The last couple of jumps, Runaway Again “really started to knuckle down,” Munger said. “He mowed them down good. It was a fantastic win for him. I’m so proud of him.”

The win was Sid Attard’s first in the Prince of Wales. He’ll be 75 years old on Sept. 29 and he’s lost a few to his nephew, Kevin Attard, leading trainer of the year in Canada last year. In 2007, Kevin Attard won the Prince of Wales with Alezzandro, while Uncle Sid finished second with Jigg’s Coz. Now he’s reversed it. Kevin trained three of the seven in the race, one of them Mansetti.

Sid has had a couple of thirds in the race. But the win? It means “lots.”

“It’s fun,” he said. “I thought at the eighth pole, we were going to be second and then he came out and this horse could go all day, honest to god.”

Sid, who has 36 horses at Woodbine, says Runaway Again was very hard to handle when he first got him at the beginning of the year. But his employees – exercise rider, groom, hotwalkers, have worked diligently with him to make him manageable. Even Sid’s brother, Larry, (Hall of Fame jockey) has been walking him in the mornings, because “sometimes he’s tough.”

The stable has been coming to Fort Erie to school him, but two days before the race, Runaway Again almost got away. “If he sees something he don’t like behind him, he just stop and he will go in the air,” Sid said.

Sid’s exercise rider remains unfazed by it all. “Don’t worry,” he told Sid. “He’s not going to hurt me.”

This makes Sid laugh.

The day before the race, he was fine in the morning.

The thing about Runaway Again is that he is a very nervous horse, Munger said. “He’s not mad. He’s not crazy. He’s just nervous. If you are kind of nice to him, he’ll be kind of nice to you back.

“But don’t try to tell him what to do and don’t try to bully him. He’ll do things at his pace and he’ll do it properly. You’ve just got to trust him.”

Although Munger has won a couple of Grade Ones in the past, the $400,00 purse at Fort Erie is his biggest taking. In 2023, he came to Canada from South Africa to ride at Woodbine. The move had been on his radar for a long time, but COVID slowed him down. “It took me a while [three years] to get here,” he said. He has Canadian citizenship because his father is from Canada. An uncle, Stuart Randolph was a successful jockey in South Africa.

He rode in Singapore while waiting out COVID, and was also a leading rider in Zimbabwe. (Not many people around these parts can say that.) All of the experience has been good for him – to hone his skills before the move to Canada, where he says the jockey colony at Woodbine is so tight, with a lot of top jockeys already with top barns, that it can be difficult to break in. He has longtime agent (Emma-Jayne Wilson) Mike Luider handling his book.

The Prince of Wales has given Munger the big splash he needs. He will turn 30 on Monday (Sept.15), is a bright spot on the scene, and has a horse that could be anything.

“He’s very raw, but there is so much in there,” Munger said. “And he does have his quirks but I feel like I get on with him. Riding him first time out, I got to know him very well. I just feel his nature just suits my nature.”

The world could be Runaway Again’s oyster in the future. And perhaps Munger’s, too.