New European strategy proving fruitful for Go Racing
A new strategy of buying trial and breeze up horses in Europe and racing them as young horses with Joseph O’Brien before sending them to Chris Waller in Australia, is off to a great start for New Zealand-based syndication company Go Racing.
Go Racing have so far purchased two horses under this new model, the first Up and Under is one of the most exciting young stayers in Europe and the other Etna Rosso was an impressive winner on debut at Limerick on Saturday.
“I was happy with his first performance he was good and professional,” jockey Dylan McMonagle said. “He jumped good from the gates and carried me along lovely. It was very simple I just followed the lead horse and I got a lovely tow into it, he travelled nicely into the straight and picked up nicely the whole way to the line.
“He’s still plenty raw he was rolling around a little bit, but he hit the line well. He stays good and he’s good and genuine and he’s going to come on plenty nice with the experience of that run under his belt.”
French-bred three-year-old colt Up and Under has had two starts for a third on debut at Navan and close second behind White Birch in the Gr.3 P.W. McGrath Memorial Ballysax Stakes (1m2f) at Leopardstown.
“We started this program last year,” Go Racing’s Racing Manager Albert Bosma said. “The idea is that they race up there for their two and three-year-old seasons and target iconic races like the Derby and the Royal Ascot meeting, then we will bring them down to Australia to be trained by Chris Waller as older horses where they will target the lucrative cup races.
“What we do is analyse the available data to the nth degree to find horses that are going to get ten furlongs or further that have group ability. We’re very picky, the first year we had a short list of five horses out of 800 and we bought one (Up and Under) then out of probably 600 trial horses we picked out one which was Etna Rosso.
“It’s a great pathway for people to get involved in really good staying horses with Group ability.”
Albert said that they will be adding to the program in the next month.
“We’re heading back up to the Arqana and Tattersall’s breeze up sales so if anyone wants to get on the bandwagon of this fabulous way of selecting and racing horses they should get in touch.”
To view a replay of the race click here.