It was a thrilling win for Athabascan on Saturday in the Lexus CTC Cup at Randwick for John O’Shea, Tom Sherry and connections.
The O’Shea-trained gelding went into Saturday’s Listed CTC Cup as a winner of one race. However, under Tom Sherry, he was relentless over the 2400-metre journey, beating the rest of the field by 2.44 lengths. The 5yo shot clear rounding the home bend and stayed on strongly to the line.
It was the first stakes victory for Athabascan, with the five-year-old gelding previously having placed three times at Listed level in France, as well as in the Listed Canberra Cup in Australia earlier this year.
Athabascan became the tenth individual stakes winner from 250 starters for New Zealand (and French) stallion Almanzor. He is out of the Listed winning mare Alzubra and is a half-brother to Arapaho, who landed the Group 1 Tancred Stakes this year.
After the convincing win on Saturday, the five-year-old will now head towards the 2400m Group 3 Colin Stephen Quality at Rosehill on September 23. Hopefully he’ll then make his way to Victoria to compete in the Group 3 Bart Cummings in a bid to qualify for the Melbourne Cup.
Exciting times ahead for the son of Almanzor!
The above was formed by excerpts from the TTR article (read in full here) and the ANZ Bloodstock Magazine (read here.)