The five-year-old could not get a clear run but still managed to come home in fourth in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes on British Champions Day at Ascot, which produced a 100-1 shock winner in Cicero\u2019s Gift.<\/p>\n
Eustace believes his stable star has come out of the Group One contest in rude health and will be heading to Asia next month.<\/p>\n
There had never been a European winner in the 31-year history of the Grade One race at Kyoto, which offers over \u00a3890,000 in prize money for first place.<\/p>\n
The Park Lodge handler will also have Australian jockey Mark Zahra, who guided Docklands to Queen Anne Stakes success in June, back in the saddle in Japan.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe seems fine. He seems his usual self so all good there,\u201d Eustace said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought he ran super. Tom (Marquand, jockey) actually felt although visually it looked a slightly troubled passage, it was more the tacky ground that actually blunted his finish than the trip he got.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought with either a perfectly clear trip or better ground he might have been third and sort of stay on to the line, but we were delighted with him.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked if it is all systems go to Kyoto, Eustace said: \u201cVery much so. I thought he looked as good as ever and as long as he\u2019s in good form, he\u2019ll still go.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe flies on November 7 and then he runs on November 23.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure Mark Zahra\u2019s going to come and ride him. We are delighted with that, he messaged after watching the race and he\u2019s looking forward to it too.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The five-year-old could not get a clear run but still managed to come home in fourth in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217503,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[3004,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-217502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-racing","tag-racing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}