TRAINER John O’Shea is likely to bypass the opportunity to win January’s $2m Magic Millions 2YO Classic to concentrate on the Group 1 Golden Slipper Stakes with stylish More Than Ready colt Faustus who kicked off his career with an impresisve win at Rosehill yesterday.
More Than Ready has sired two Magic Millions winners, Augusta Proud and Phelan Ready, but as O’Shea would be well aware, having trained Elite Falls to place in the Slipper this year, More Than Ready also has two Slipper winner under the belt namely Phelan Ready and Sebring.
“Faustus will come home now and I would have thought he would head towards the Skyline Stakes and go from there,” O’Shea said.
“He has a lovely action, we came here thinking he was a really nice chance but the boom around some of the others had us thinking.”
In the end, Faustus was able to fend off the Gai Waterhouse runner, Kuchinskaya (a grand-daughter of Vinery Stud foundation sire Red Ransom) to win narrowly but with authority.
“It was really a track gallop, three-quarter, home one, so he is a very nice colt,” winning jockey Jim Cassidy declared.
“He is a lovely colt, he was new, he has just unbelievable improvement in him, beautiful horse.”
Faustus was bred by John Singleton’s Strawberry Hills Stud and sold at the 2011 Magic Millions Yearling sale for $290,000 to the Cox-Mitchell Syndicate headed up by former Group One trainer Bill Mitchell and current Magic Millions managing director Vin Cox.
The colt is one of more than 50 individual winners bred on the remarkable More Than Ready/Danehill mare nick that is shared by the likes of Group 1 winners Benicio, Perfectly Ready and Dreamaway.
Apart from Faustus, More Than Ready’s current crop of two-year-old also boasts the VRC Maribyrnong Trial winner, Cambiaso, another graduate of the Magic Millions 2011 sale.
