There will be a lot of horses more pleasing to the eye racing at Rosehill, but it might be hard to find one with as much promise or heart as Galaxy Warrior.
Thanks to misadventure, Galaxy Warrior will make his city debut in the Highway Handicap carrying a permanent reminder of his recklessness as a young horse.
But looks aren’t everything and if the sparingly raced four-year-old loses a few fans from the parade yard, the consensus is Galaxy Warrior can win them back with his deeds on the racetrack.
“He wouldn’t win a ribbon in the show ring to be honest, but he’s a big, strong type and he’s got an economical action,” trainer Gayna Williams said.
“As a yearling he must have run into something and he has a huge dent in his nasal bone.
“He was in intensive care at the vets in Scone for quite a while and he was bordering on being euthanised.”
After winning his past two starts on central western NSW racetracks by a combined margin of almost 10 lengths, Galaxy Warrior is a short-priced favourite to make it a hat-trick on Saturday.
Galaxy Warrior carries the Williams polish that once made her a genuine force in country NSW racing when she trained a large string at Bathurst.
Williams moved to the Northern Rivers but she has returned to the central west with a reduced team to train out of stables on the Mudgee racetrack via a stopover at nearby Guntawang Thoroughbred Stud.
“I’d prefer at this stage keep the numbers a bit lower to give a bit more individual treatment,” Williams said.
Galaxy Warrior has thrived under Williams’s attention to detail.
“He came to me last year and he had a few soreness issues and he was examined and X-rayed by three vets but they couldn’t find any issue,” she said.
“It got to the stage where we threw our hands up in the air and said `give him time’.”
The trainer’s patience has worked in tandem with Mother Nature to make Galaxy Warrior worthy of Rosehill favouritism as Williams tries to win her first NSW metropolitan race in a decade.
“Hasta Manana won at the first Hawkesbury stand-alone Saturday meeting (in 2006), that’s how long ago it was. And then he won at Rosehill soon after that.”
