Latin Song ready for an Ascot rendition
THE team surrounding Sixties Song know the scale of the task facing them when the colt makes history in the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot on Saturday.
The best horse currently racing in South America will be the first horse trained on that continent to race in Britain.
Facing him will be 2016 winner Highland Reel, Eclipse Stakes scorer Ulysses and, almost certainly, John Gosden’s dual Oaks winner Enable, new 13-8 favourite after the strongest hint so far she will run with Frankie Dettori riding.
The line-up will make it the best race so far this season.
Vet Carlos Cambas, who accompanied the Alfredo Gaitan Dassie-trained fouryear-old on the 14-hour flight from Buenos Aires to Stansted, said: ‘We are realists and our feet are firmly on the ground. But sometimes the team from the second division can beat the side from the first!’
The football analogy is apt. The colours carried by Sixties Song include the yellow and blue of Boca Juniors, the club followed by Alfredo Gaitan Dassie and part-owner Alberto Roberti.
As a boy, Gaitan Dassie worked as a petrol pump attendant and became a jockey when rejected by the military because he was too small.
Now one of Argentina’s top trainers with 130 horses at his base at San Isidro racetrack, he has guided Sixties Song to success in two of South America’s biggest races, the Gran Premio Carlos Pellegrini and Gran Premio Latinamerico.
For the past six weeks, every morning at 4am, Gaitan Dassie has taken Sixties Song to Palermo racetrack in central Buenos Aires where he has worked alone right-handed under floodlights, something alien to Argentinian horses, to prepare him for Ascot.
The 50-1 shot, with jockey Jamie Spencer booked, will also be facing an undulating track for the first time.
Gaitan Dassie’s son and assistant Nico said: ‘The King George is a prestigious race and we are delighted to be here. The horse is ready. It will be tough but we are optimistic about the result.’
With the ground currently described as soft at Ascot and the forecast unsettled for the week ahead, last year’s winner Highland Reel, who needs top of the ground to be seen at his best, drifted a little in the market from 13-8 to 15-8 with Coral.
Enable, who had seemed likely to head towards the Yorkshire Oaks at York next month, is now on the verge of taking part just two weeks after a classy performance in the Irish Oaks at the Curragh.
The Khalid Abdullah-owned filly was cut to 7-4 from 15-8 with Coral after Gosden indicated a final decision would be made on Wednesday.