Being a part of the Black Caviar entourage in England earlier this year was an experience Brett Cavanough won’t forget and one that inadvertently led to the resurrection of Bossdon City’s career.
A one-time favourite for the 2011 Blue Diamond Stakes, Bossdon City’s bubble burst almost as soon as it had begun with a debilitating bone disease threatening his future.
New shoes have worked where drug therapies failed and the four-year-old will run at Warwick Farm on Saturday after two recent wins in the Riverina.
“He has something called chondritis and when I was in England I saw horses there with similar problems,” Cavanough said.
“Because they work uphill they have a lot of hind leg lameness and are shod differently.
“They recommended a drug we hadn’t tried but it had no effect so we got the farrier to work on him. It’s a matter of stabilising the feet behind and it seems to have worked.
“We don’t really know how to manage it in Australia and I must have spent about $15,000 before he responded to the new way of shoeing.”
Cavanough, who trains at Albury, is a renowned horse breaker and counts Black Caviar among his former pupils.
Bossdon City made a winning debut at Randwick in January last year, beating million-dollar colt Godspeed to earn a shot at the Blue Diamond Preview.
The boom was short-lived and his problems surfaced after he ran fifth to Sepoy in the Preview.
“He was favourite for everything after he beat the million-dollar colt the first time,” Cavanough said.
“But the more we got into him, the slower he got.”
Godspeed has won just one race from eight starts and his now with his third trainer, David Vandyke, after beginning with Gerald Ryan before being transferred to Peter Moody.
Bossdon City runs over 1000m in the Benchmark 75 on Saturday with Nash Rawiller to ride.
