Talented four year-old Justify (USA) mare Love Story has been showing talent at the trials since July last year, but it’s taken her a while to bring that to race day and we saw a glimpse of her potential at Randwick on Wednesday.
Trained by Gai Waterhouse and Adrian Bott, Love Story was a good second on debut last month and was a red hot favourite today in the 1400m maiden with Adam Hyeronimus to ride.
She led and controlled the race, before slipping clear of her rivals to win by a commanding three lengths.
“Today she was able to find that nice rhythm over the 1400m and keep building into it and she put the race away at the top of the straight,” said Adrian Bott.
“Coolmore and their partners have been really patient as she did show us plenty of ability early days, but we had a setback and we had to give her time and they gave us that option to keepo her in training for hopefully another couple of seasons.
“Even though she’s four, she still has a lot of maturing to do physically and as she continues to strengthen up there are plenty of nice races for those older mares and I think she can get to a good level in time.”
Love Story is a homebred for Coolmore and is from the 2013 NZB Filly of the Year Fix (NZ), a multiple Group winner by Wootton Bassett’s sire Iffraaj that was bought by Tom Magnier for $1.25million at the 2015 MM National Broodmare Sale.
Fix was sent to stud in Ireland and produced three winners by Galileo including Group placed Know Thyself before returning to Australia in foal to Frankel and the result of that mating is also a winner named Viktor.
Love Story is the fifth winner from six foals to race from Fix, who also has an unnamed two year--old colt by Justify and is due to foal to Switzerland this spring after missing to Shinzo the previous year.
