John O’Shea has provided James McDonald with seven of his 100 Group 1 victories and the trainer suspects those numbers can increase by one when McDonald rides for him in Saturday’s $2 million Victoria Derby (2500m) at Flemington.
It has been more than eight years since the pair combined for a win at the elite level, when Hauraki took the Epsom Handicap at Randwick at a time when O’Shea was the head trainer for Godolphin Australia.
“We’re due to have another nice race win,” O’Shea said on Tuesday.
“We’re pleased to get him as I think he was holding out for the Godolphin horse (Broadsiding) and when it was announced he wouldn’t run, we picked him up.
“We ran the gauntlet a bit, but it all turned out well.”
McDonald rode King Of Thunder (NZ) (Tivaci) for the first time when he was a fast-finishing third in the G2 Vase (2040m) at The Valley, but he could not confirm his Victoria Derby intentions until he got word on Monday about Godolphin’s intentions with Broadsiding.
King Of Thunder’s run for third in the Vase was an eye-catcher that hardly surprised O’Shea or training partner Tom Charlton given his encouraging lead-up runs and his capacity to run a trip.
“He’s a genuine mile-and-a-half horse that would be best suited by a good tempo in the race,” he said. “That run (last Saturday) was that last step towards the Derby and he performed really well.
“We’ll have no problems with the trip for him, so you’d expect him to go well.”
O’Shea purchased the son of Tivaci out of a two-year-old Ready To Run sale in New Zealand for just NZ$50,000, with the trainer explaining the horse’s videos showed him to be star of the future.
“To be fair, Mike Rennie from Waikato (Stud), they’d passed him in at the sale and he rang me up and said ‘He’s a nice horse’ so, after I watched a video of him, I said ‘Send it over’ and away we went.”
If King Of Thunder was to win Saturday’s Victoria Derby, he would be one of the early favourites for the next year’s Melbourne Cup, but O’Shea said he is no longer keen on sending a young horse to that race.
“I am not a fan of running four-year-olds in the Melbourne Cup, but we’ll go through the Derby process now and through the autumn and then give him a relatively light spring next year,” he said.
“I’ve got a belief that the machinations of the race changed with the advent of the internationals.
“In the old days, it was a natural progression for horses to come out of their Derbies and progress to the Melbourne Cup as four-year-olds.
“But I think the internationals have shown they lack seasoning those four-year-olds and they were getting badly handicapped as well.
“We’ll just take out time and they’ll get there (Melbourne Cup) when they are five or six.”
