John Oxx still plans to train Born To Sea with a tilt at next year’s 2000 Guineas in mind after he was beaten and suffered an injury at Leopardstown on Sunday.
The juvenile is a half-brother to Oxx’s brilliant colt Sea The Stars who went through his three-year-old career unbeaten.
Born To Sea, who can also count the brilliant Galileo as a sibling, made a winning debut at the Curragh in September and was sent off at odds-on for the Killavullan Stakes at the weekend.
Although Oxx was initially disappointed his charge was beaten by Aidan O’Brien’s Nephrite, connections subsequently found that he had torn a muscle, which appears to have occurred coming out of the stalls.
With that in mind, the master of Currabeg feels his charge ran with great credit and he will be trained with Newmarket in mind in the spring.
“That (2000 Guineas) would be the plan, we’re still hoping for it,” Oxx said.
“He didn’t get the chance on Sunday to prove himself as we’d have liked and that’s a bit irritating, but we still think he’s done enough that he can be considered for the Guineas and trained for it.
“We’ll just see now how everything goes in the spring and see how he measures up, but Newmarket is the first objective.
“It wouldn’t be a long-term injury. It wasn’t minor on the day, obviously, but it’s minor in that it’s not something that will be a problem in the future.
“We think he probably did it coming out of the stalls as he stumbled and came out on his head.
“After that he started to get a high, climbing action, which they do if they start to push from behind.
“Thank goodness it was nothing serious and he’ll recover from it in the normal way.
“We were a little disappointed immediately afterwards. He hadn’t run badly and the winner is obviously smart, but we were a bit disappointed, so it was nice that we found an obvious explanation.”
With the Guineas trials at Leopardstown set to be run later than usual next year, Oxx is not ruling out giving his Classic hope a run before he heads to Headquarters.
“The Guineas trials at Leopardstown are going to be in the middle of April next year. They are normally at the end of March, which is too early,” the trainer said.
“There is a possibility we could run him in a trial – I wouldn’t rule it out.”
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