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| Staff Writer |
Tony Millard trained Panfield’s is aimed at the 2021 Gr.1 Melbourne Cup with the trainer remaining upbeat about his star stayer’s chances of competing abroad in the 'race that stops the nation.'
“We’re just doing our due diligence at the moment it’s very exciting and we’ve been inundated with things from Australia,” Millard said. “He’s progressive and I don’t think there will be a problem with the distance, his female line suggests that he shouldn’t have a problem with that.”
A son of Lookin At Lucky, Panfield claimed Chile’s 2019 Triple Crown with consecutive Gr.1 triumphs and burst onto the scene in Hong Kong with a strong third placing in the BMW Hong Kong Derby (2000m) before his tenacious victory in May’s Gr.1 Standard Chartered Champions & Chater Cup (2400m).
“He’s just started his preparation, we have put him back in work now and we’ll see how we go but I think we’re going to make a call pretty soon either way in the next week or so if we are going to proceed – it’d be great if we could, it’d be nice to have a tilt at the Melbourne Cup,” Millard said.
Recently introduced regulations and measures by Racing Victoria and the Victoria Racing Club requires more boxes to be ticked for connections to race a horse in Melbourne’s Spring Carnival, such as a series of pre-export tests with regard to the soundness of the horse before having to comply with further pre-race testing while in quarantine at Werribee in Melbourne.
"We’d like to run him here earlier but we’ll see how it pans out, so for him to have a run here and then go is the rough plan but we haven’t seen the fixtures yet so all of these things have to fall into place,” Millard said.