Desert Flower (royal blue) winning the bet365 Fillies Mile at Newmarket © Photo Healy Racing
Desert Flower stamped her class on the bet365 Fillies’ Mile with a stunning success at Newmarket.
Unbeaten in her previous three races, Charlie Appleby’s Night Of Thunder filly took her form to another level in the Group One feature.
Perhaps not to the liking of everyone when taking the May Hill Stakes at Doncaster, Aidan O’Brien fielded three very highly-regarded fillies against her, with Ryan Moore choosing January, a length and a half behind the winner on Town Moor.
Heading into the dip as Dreamy, another O’Brien inmate, dropped away, there were still three in contention, the Ballydoyle pair of Ballet Slippers and January and the eventual winner, who at the time just looked a bit unbalanced.
When they met the rising ground, though, the race was over, and as William Buick straightened her out she powered away, with the 10-11 favourite running out an impressive five-and-a-half-length winner from January.
Coral cut the winner to 4-1 from 10s for next year’s 1000 Guineas behind 3-1 favourite Lake Victoria.
Appleby said: “You couldn’t be any more impressed and of course at Doncaster when you have an unbeaten filly going into a May Hill everyone was expecting a bit of a ‘wow’.
“She was harder to manage – going down to post she took William on, I wasn’t there that day and Alex Meriam (assistant) and the team did a great job, but she took some managing.
“William wasn’t sure what sort of filly he was going to have that day but once she jumped off in the race and he popped her in behind one, ultimately she switched off and did it the right way round.”
He went on: “Today I thought she paraded very well and everything was nice and calm and collected. It is always nice at this level to control all that energy. She will be a more mature filly for this in the spring.
“She is a filly who has pleased us, we were confident in her maiden and she has just kept pleasing us throughout. She’s not an exciting filly in the morning, but the way she does stuff and pulls up at the end of a gallop, it is as if she hasn’t been through a gallop.
“She won’t go five-lengths clear in a gallop but she will go a length ahead of a nice lead horse, pull up and walk home and that gives you encouragement. The team were very positive coming into today that if she was good enough she had done everything right at home.
“I think we’ve all seen her going round the paddock and she is a big, scopey filly, if she puts another 20 kilos on over the winter I will be delighted to see her in the spring. She hasn’t got to and she’s running well enough in the condition she is in, but naturally you would love to see her put a bit of condition on over the winter.
“That is definitely her done for the year. I don’t see much point going away from where we are at the moment (a mile) next season. Could she stretch out to 10 furlongs? Possibly. She’s a nice horse to go into winter with and we will be back in the spring.”
O’Brien said of his three runners, with Ballet Slippers behind January in third and Dreamy fourth: “I’m delighted and they all ran great races really. They ran as we thought they might and ran nice races.
“They are three to look forward to next year and they are all Classic-type fillies.”
