An astute trainer and very successful horse breeder, Danny O’Brien was hoping to breed an Oaks filly when he sent O’Reilly mare Tralee Chorus to his Cox Plate winner Shamus Award, but he might have got something even better.
Easy in the market for the 1100m juvenile event at Flemington on Saturday, the Danny O’Brien trained Shamus Award filly Aethera appeared to face an uphill battle when locked up on the fence back in the field with 350m to run.
It took some patient riding from Damien Thornton to extricate Aethera from her sticky spot on the rail into clear running, but when she saw daylight it was game over.
Aethera let down brilliantly to run past Home Affairs first starter Profumo to win by two lengths running away.
Aethera is bred to be good being the second winner from stakes-placed O’Reilly mare Tralee Chorus, who is a full sister to the dam of Group I winners Orchestral and Savaglee, who are both by Savabeel.
“She's a lovely filly. She's obviously by Shamus Award and we've bred quite a few over the years by him including El Patroness who won at AJC Oaks,” said Danny O’Brien.
“That was the theory with this filly. We went and bought another O'Reilly mare and that was the same cross that produced El Patroness. She's since had a lot of upgrades to her pedigree, including Orchestral and a couple of other very nice horses on the page, so this filly is bred to be pretty good.
“Damien Thornton's been really positive on her jump outs and said there's a really big motor here, she just doesn't know how to do it yet. We just saw a little bit of that late when she got out today and she put that race to bed very quickly.”
Aethera will now be put away with spring goals in mind, although O’Brien believes she might have too much brilliance to be an Oaks filly as he had planned.
“She was potentially going to go to the trials at Caulfield Heath next Thursday, but we thought, we may as well just bring her across the road to finish off her prep and see if she's up to a spring campaign,” said O’Brien.
“On what we saw then, she certainly looks like she will be. I don't think she'll be quite as stout as El Patroness though, she's been a bit brilliant there, winning at the 1100, so I suspect she's probably topping out of the mile, but there's plenty of other good stakes races besides the Oaks.”
With six stakes-winners this season in Australia and New Zealand, Shamus Award is always consistent and stands at Rosemont Stud at a fee of $33,000 this spring.
