Their horses are fit and well and ready to run the race of their lives.
But none of the trainers lined up against Pierro and Gai Waterhouse in Saturday’s $1 million Group One Caulfield Guineas are rehearsing victory speeches.
Pierro and Waterhouse are as formidable a combination as will be seen in any Group One race this spring.
The horse is favourite at $1.26 and his trainer, no doubt, thinks he should be shorter.
“He’s quite exceptional,” Waterhouse said after Pierro’s final Guineas workout this week.
“You’ll see that in the Guineas on Saturday.”
Pierro is attempting to stretch his unbeaten run to nine in the race that ranks behind only the Golden Slipper – which he’s already won – as a stallion maker.
And there appears to be no stopping him.
The trainers of some the best three-year-olds available will each be rewarded for turning up in the Guineas in which the last of the eight runners receives $20,000.
But the $600,000 first prize seems bound to be added to Pierro’s tally of $3.1 million.
John Hawkes, who saddles a horse perfectly named for the Guineas – All Too Hard – believes the frustrations he has endured with the colt this preparation are behind him.
But Pierro is in front of him.
Hawkes said All Too Hard’s barrier manners seem to be improved and the distance of the Guineas is right for a colt once rated as Pierro’s equal.
“It’s just a matter of whether he brings his A game to the races,” Hawkes said.
“The thing is Pierro does that every time.”
John O’Shea runs Ashokan, a colt who could be the one to serve it up to Pierro.
“We’ll be aggressive, we won’t die wondering,” O’Shea said.
“But it’s going to be tough.”
Leon Corstens, the Melbourne trainer who has produced a couple of the best Guineas winners of the past decade, goes in double-handed against Pierro.
“I’m hoping, but what can you do,” he said.
“It would have to go drastically wrong for Pierro to be beaten.”
Pierro’s closest rival in the Guineas is Epaulette, a colt who has also been his closest rival on the racetrack.
Epaulette ran Pierro to a short half-head at Rosehill in March.
“One of the few positives we can take into it is that we’ve got closer than anyone else has to Pierro,” said Epaulette’s rider Kerrin McEvoy.
McEvoy was exaggerating.
The narrow defeat is the only positive he came up with, and it was really a negative.
There is, however, one glimmer of hope.
Kingston Town, who was trained by Waterhouse’s father Tommy Smith, came to the 1979 Caulfield Guineas flying in much the same banner as Pierro.
He started a long odds-on favourite and finished third.
Waterhouse isn’t a better trainer than her father, and there may not have been a better horse to race in Australia since Kingston Town.
