Classy New Zealand-bred four-year-old Western Empire is set to start an overwhelming favourite in Saturday’s Gr.1 Railway Stakes (1600m) at Ascot in Perth, with the son of Iffraaj set to jump from barrier 3 in the 16-strong field.
The Grant and Alana Williams-trained galloper has won six of his past seven starts, and enters off the back of an impressive win in the Gr.3 Asian Beau Stakes (1400m).
Bred and raced by leviathan owners Bob and Sandra Peters, Western Empire won last season’s Gr.2 WATC Derby (2400m) and looks perfectly placed in Saturday’s A$1 million feature, with ace jockey William Pike set to ride the gelding on the minimum, 53kgs in the time-honoured handicap.
While Bob Peters is confident of a good performance from his exciting four-year-old, he is concerned about the weight of expectation on the $1.75 favourite.
“When you look at the markets, they’ve just gone completely over the top,” Peters told TAB radio.
“It worries me because most of the short-priced favourites that I can remember have been beaten in the race. People are working on potential rather than working out how the race might be run. We all know that the Railway is a very hard race to win.
“He ran very well when resuming in the Asian Beau. The weights suited him and the weights suit him again in the Railway.
“It was good to see he’d come back because we’ve had quite a few Derby winners over the years that haven’t come back. The only one that came back in a very good way was Regal Power.”
There has been plenty of publicity about the lack of interstate raiders, with Western Australia’s borders closed, but Peters did not believe the Railway would be significantly weaker than usual.
“It’s a good field, there’s no doubt about that. The Eastern State horses haven’t had a really great record in the race, they win occasionally but they’re not usually the problem. It’s usually the locals that are the problem.”
Peters believes Western Empire will be able to sit handy to the speed from his inside draw and is a much more polished racehorse than the often green three-year-old of last season.
“He’s taken a while and everyone was starting to get frustrated with him early on when he was a three-year-old but there were some slowly run races that he got caught up and he was getting himself into trouble,” Peters said.
“I can remember saying to the team ‘just keep racing him, he’ll learn’, and hopefully he has and he seems to have with the way he’s come back.”
By former Haunui Farm shuttle stallion Iffraaj, Western Empire is out of Gr.2 Perth Cup (2400m) winner Western Jewel, whom Peters raced.
Iffraaj is already the sire of 10 individual Group One winners and will be represented by 21 yearlings at Karaka 2022.
The cerise and white silks of Peters have saluted in the Railway with Old Comrade (2001), Elite Belle (2014), Galaxy Star (2018), Regal Power (2019) and Inspirational Girl (2020).
Peters reported that that last year’s Railway winner Inspirational Girl, a daughter of Reliable Man who had just one Spring Carnival run for Danny O’Brien, has recovered from throat surgery and is back in Victoria to be prepared for a late autumn return.
