Sydney Cup winner Selino will aim to defend his title in the race next year before a potential tilt at the Gold Cup at Royal Ascot in the United Kingdom next June.
The Chris Waller-trained stayer finished eighth behind stablemate Verry Elleegant in Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup and his performance indicated to OTI Racing’s Terry Henderson that he would tick one of the key boxes required in the famous staying race.
“He’d certainly run the distance because he was one of the few horses running through the line, I thought he ran pretty well,” Henderson said of the horse’s performance in the Melbourne Cup.
“If you said, is he up to the same class as the Stradivarius and the Spanish Missions, no, I think he’s the next class below those.
“In that race, the ability to run 4000m, as we saw with horses like Yeats, is paramount and he certainly can do that.
“He’s now fully mature, this horse, so it’d be an interesting exercise and a great experience for the trainer and owners.”
Australian-trained horses like Choisir, Miss Andretti and Black Caviar have famously had success in the sprint races at Royal Ascot, but Henderson is looking forward to taking on the best Northern Hemisphere stayers in their own part of the world.
“I think, in the context of taking a stayer from Australia, trained by Chris Waller, to compete with what really is the key strength of the English and Irish, that’s the staying, there’s a certain amount of excitement in the challenge of doing that,” he said.
Royal Ascot 2022 could be particularly significant for Waller, with the possibility that he could also take The Everest winner Nature Strip to the meeting for races like the King’s Stand Stakes or the Diamond Jubilee Stakes, which he came agonisingly close to winning with Brazen Beau in 2015.
This article was written by Edward Sadler and can be read in full through Racing.com here.
