Kentucky Derby not yet out of the question for Brave Emperor

Middleham Park weighing up pros and cons of Churchill Downs adventure.

Connections of Brave Emperor have still not totally discounted heading Stateside for the Kentucky Derby.

The Archie Watson-trained gelding won at Kempton to earn valuable points towards qualifying for the ‘Run for the Roses’ at Churchill Downs and was second in a GBP 100,000 race at Chelmsford on Saturday evening which also carried points.

While his syndicate of owners are excited about the possibility of the challenge, the unsubsidised cost of getting to America and back is something of a stumbling block.

Tom Palin, who manages the Middleham Park Racing syndicate which owns Brave Emperor, said: “We’re still in discussions with the owners, it’s not going to be cheap. Probably about GBP 120/130,000 to get there and back on our own which will burn through all of his prize-money and then some.

“We just need to have a grown up conversation with the owners. They provide incentives to travel to the Breeders’ Cup, but maybe the Kentucky Derby is such a standalone event they feel they don’t need to as everyone wants to run in it.

“He’s brave, he grinds and he gallops. I was really taken with how he got his elbows out and got down and dirty at Chelmsford as it was a messy race.

“You never know how they will transfer their form to dirt or adapt to American racing, but he does have a lot of the right credentials. You’d go there hopeful he could handle it but definitely not confident.

“It’s something we would love to do, but it’s just if we can make sense of the numbers. Then again, horse racing is not really an industry where one should try and make too much sense of it.”

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