Aidan O'Brien has already lost Scorpion ahead of next Tuesday's Melbourne Cup and Ireland's champion trainer looks like he could now be facing a race against time to try to get his other cup candidate, Mahler, to Australia's most famous race in peak condition.
Mahler worked at his Sandown Park base yesterday but sweated up noticeably and O'Brien, paying his first visit to Melbourne, acknowledged his St Leger runner-up appeared anxious. The Irish three-year-old, a major ante-post gamble for the race that stops a nation, has a Northern Hemisphere winter coat on him and removing that is likely to be the first step in getting Mahler to acclimatise a little better.
"He was a bit anxious and a bit hairy so we will clip him for the hairy part," said O'Brien in front of a large media presence at the quarantine centre on the outskirts of the Victorian capital. "And in the next few days we might get a vibe that he's coming along and that it's starting to come together. We've only got a short time to do it so we'll see."
O'Brien was willing to attribute at least part of Mahler's unease to the absence of Scorpion whose leg injury now means he will take up a career at stud.
"He's had a lead horse and now that he's gone that could have caused him a bit of anxiety," he said. The Ballydoyle trainer said he was hoping for a good to firm track at Flemington but added: "I know they are forecasting rain at the weekend so we can only hope conditions will be suitable."
Mahler is expected to work again tomorrow morning but although his big-race rider, Stephen Baster, will be present, he is not expected to team up with the Irish horse ahead of Tuesday's Cup. "The reason we don't want Stephen to ride him is that the horse has a good bit to overcome anyway at the moment," O'Brien said.
O'Brien has been the centre of a lot of media attention since arriving in Australia earlier in the week and even earned comparisons with one of the country's favourite sporting sons.
"Describing Aidan O'Brien as a hands on trainer is a bit like calling Shane Warne a good bowler," said The Age newspaper yesterday morning.
Mahler remains a general 10 to 1 shot but the favourite is Luca Cumani's Purple Moon and the English-based trainer believes the presence of the Irish horse could be crucial to the way the Cup will be run. "If they send him out in front, there might be a pace throughout the race rather than the traditional way the cup is run, a sprint to the first bend, then drop anchor and sprint again for the last 800 or 1,000 metres.
"With Mahler in the race, it will give a very different perspective to the cup. He is a very high-class horse, a cruiser and a grinder. He can grind other horses into submission," Cumani said.
Johnny Murtagh will be in action in today's Group One Criterium International at the Saint-Cloud track in Paris where he teams up with the Richard Hannon-trained Redolent.
Along with the Barry Hills-trained Yarkadi (Richard Hughes), Redolent will tackle four home colts headed by the highly-regarded Thewayyouare who is owned by the Irish businessman Seán Mulryan.
Thewayyouare is already being quoted for next year's Derby after an impressive course win in the Prix Thomas Byron.
Horse Racing Ireland have confirmed a replacement fixture for Dundalk on December 5th to compensate for last Friday's loss.
