Cavanough doing rain dance ahead of Winx Guineas
Forecast rain later this week at Caloundra will be music to the ears of Scone trainer Brett Cavanough, who is mulling over taking lightly raced three-year-old Sungblue (Your Song) to Queensland for Saturday’s Winx Guineas (Gr 3, 1600m).
At first glance, it might appear an ambitious task for the last-start winner of the Highway Handicap (1400m), a Sydney race restricted to NSW country-trained horses, but Cavanough reasons that the merit of the three-year-old gelding’s performance, and his preference for wet tracks, made the $200,000 race at the Sunshine Coast an attractive proposition.
“Obviously we think it’s going to be a very strong race, but we wanted to test him hoping it’s going to be wet because he’s a ‘wetty’. He won his maiden at Gosford [last November] and then won a Highway doing it pretty tough [on the speed],” said Cavanough who holds no concerns about Sungblue being four weeks between runs.
“I don’t think there’s any need to attack him, as he just carries a good base of fitness, he looks after himself, he’s a good doer. He’s not a gross horse, by any means.”
As a back-up plan, the gelding is also nominated for a $150,000 2&3YO Benchmark 72 Handicap (1300m) at Rosehill on Saturday, but if he does head to the Sunshine Coast, he is set to take on lightly raced Kiwi Badgers Nuts (Rageese) and last-start Gunsynd Classic (Gr 3, 1600m) runner-up Battleton (Zoustar), a gelding trained by Bjorn Baker, as well as Champagne Pop (Spirit Of Boom) and Rayjen (So You Think) from Tattersall’s Tiara (Gr 1, 1400m) winning trainer Rob Heathcote’s stable.
“You can pick the paper up every second week and there’s a $60 winner in a black type race, so I would like to think he’s a top three chance,” the trainer said.
“He’s at the top of his game, he’s a last-start winner, he’s well and sound and he’s honest. If we got lucky and it got wet, then he comes right into it.”
Sungblue, owned by Quirindi breeder Charlie Hill and a group of his mates, is a half-brother to Group 2-winning mare Invincible Gem, who emerged from the third crop of super sire I Am Invincible (Invincible Spirit), one of the early examples of this season’s probable champion stallion’s ability to upgrade his mares.
However, Hill believes their dam, Diamond Day (Marwina), a four-time winner, does not get the credit she deserves as the producer of four foals to race for four multiple winners, Invincible Gem naturally the leading light among the quartet.
“When you look at the mare, being Diamond Day, of course Invincible Gem gets all the focus, but she had a foal before her, a gelding by Excites (Exitozo), and Excites didn’t do a lot but that horse won the Country Cup at the Scone carnival and then she had Gem and then she had a colt by Time For War (Timerox),” Hill told ANZ Bloodstock News yesterday.
“He won three starts in his first prep and was looking really promising and then he got ill at the beginning of last year. He had a gut issue that we put down to the mouse plague.
“We’ve spent 18 months getting him back on deck and he’s now back in work [with Melanie O’Gorman] and he’s looking really promising.”
Hill is glad he retained Sungblue to race rather than selling him at the 2020 Inglis Classic Yearling Sale, where he was passed in with a reserve of $60,000.
“He got a bit of guts to him, a bit of heart. He is by the Fastnet Rock horse Your Song and we always thought that would be a nice cross in that dam line,” he said.
“We’re not sure what sort of level he’ll be at, but he has been promising so far. He’s a nice natured little horse, which is always nice in a thoroughbred.
“We’d rather race them ourselves anyway and I just put some mates into him to race. It’s a good sideline. We enjoy it, we’ve been lucky enough to have some success and it’s not the be-all-and-end-all for us to sell them.”
Rain is forecast on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.