Tassie experiment for Group 2 winner Oxley Road
Exceed And Excel stallion prospect joins Brunton stable in bid to rejuvenate career
Well-bred Group 2-winning sprinter Oxley Road (Exceed And Excel) will race on after a stud deal for the rising six-year-old entire was unable to be reached.
A brother to Vinery’s young Group 1-winning stallion Exceedance and half-brother to dual Listed winner Mac ‘N’ Cheese (Sebring), the latter a $1.6 million purchase by Yulong in 2022, the former Peter Moody-trained Oakleigh Plate (Gr 1, 1100m) placed Oxley Road is now in the stable of leading Tasmanian-based trainer Scott Brunton.
Raced by a syndicate headed by Singapore-based trainer Stephen Gray and his wife Bridget, who maintain their interest in the stallion, Oxley Road arrived about a fortnight ago at Brunton’s facility on Seven Mile Beach, near Hobart.
Brunton described his new acquisition, a stablemate of his stable star The Inevitable (Dundeel), as “a gentleman and certainly one of the nicest ones I’ve had my hands on”.
“The focus is to not depreciate his value and to try and get a couple more scores on the board. He is a beautiful horse. You don’t see them wandering around the Tassie sale ring, I can tell you,” a typically matter-of-fact Brunton said yesterday.
“It is exciting to get an opportunity with him, but I am under no illusion. They normally don’t improve outside Peter Moody’s stable. Look, I am lucky enough to have a different atmosphere and he [Moody] agreed with Stephen Gray that it would be the right sort of tact to take with him.”
Brunton has already earmarked a race at Hobert in mid-November as an ideal starting point for Oxley Road, a Zeditave Stakes (Gr 3, 1200m) and Caulfield Sprint (Gr 2, 1000m) winner who also finished runner-up in the 2022 Rubiton Stakes (Gr 2, 1100m) won by 2023 Mogumber Park first–season stallion Marine One (Capitalist).
“We are going to run him in the race called the Goodwood Handicap in Tasmania for his first-up run, it is a quality handicap with 61 kilograms top weight,” the trainer revealed.
“The Inevitable won it first-up last year, so the plan is to take small steps and if we can get him back into his winning ways and get his confidence up, we’d be all for heading over the pond [Bass Strait] and having a look at attacking something, probably not at the spring carnival, but maybe something at the tailend there [in Melbourne].
“We’ll take our time and we are going to throw everything into him because we know we need to to improve one off Pete. We’re going to give him that one-on-one attention.”
Brunton reiterated any studmasters who inspect Oxley Road would be taken by his conformation and style.
He said: “If I was into the breeding side of things – which I’m not, it’s a blood sport; it’s too hard – he has a great physique, he has a great shape, he is the perfect type of horse to look at.”
Melbourne-based bloodstock agent Mark Player had been commissioned by connections to negotiate stud deals for Oxley Road, but a suitable offer was not forthcoming which led to the horse’s move to Tasmania.
The deal was not just a financial one, with Gray and his partners also seeking viable mare support for Oxley Road.
“The studs are probably looking for a horse with a slightly higher profile that they can market and, while this horse has great speed and a lot of race day ability, things didn’t quite work out for him on the track the way the owners and the trainer had hoped,” Player said yesterday.
“He probably became a little bit harder to place in a market that is probably facing some tough decisions about what horses get support in future and that’s just the reality of where the [breeding industry] train’s at.
“Certainly, a good home for the $10,000 stallion is really hard to find. We talked to a lot of people, but the right deal just couldn’t be put together at the time. It really came down to that.”
Meanwhile, last-start All-Star Mile (1600m) placegetter The Inevitable had his first piece of “evens” work at Seven Mile Beach yesterday after “a scare with a suspensory job”.
“He looks terrific. He’s the heaviest he’s ever been, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but we’ll peel the weight off him,” Brunton said.
“He went so well in the All-Star Mile I just want to be able to showcase him a little bit more to the public, that he’s not just a one-trick pony. It wasn’t a flash-in-the-pan job.
“I really want to get him over for the spring but I am just mindful that he really needs that soft sand under his feet to keep him sound. I will space the runs out and they’ll all be in Victoria.”
Brunton has already made plans to fly The Inevitable in and out of Melbourne for his spring campaign.
“I know it seems excessive but it is what we believe he needs to keep racing,” the trainer said.
“He has four white feet and as soon as he comes off the soft sand, he gets a little bit of heat, things start changing, he starts taking weight off one [foot] or the other and it just doesn’t suit him.
“He looks terrific and it’s really exciting and I have some really nice horses to muck around with and hopefully I don’t make a mistake and we come up trumps.”