Aerovelocity is a dream on the racetrack but getting him there can be a nightmare and trainer Paul O'Sullivan prepared for the headstrong sprinter's inevitable pre-race antics with a parade ring test this morning at Kranji.
As the powerful gelding's regular rider Zac Purton said yesterday: "Riding him in a race is easy, getting on his back and getting him to the track is the hard part."
O'Sullivan's said his stable star is "like a kid's pony once he is on the turf", but a Jekyll and Hyde transformation occurs when near other horses and in the moments before his rider is legged aboard.
"He is pretty aggressive and he doesn't like other horses," O'Sullivan said. "Once he is out there he is fine, and once he has finished working or racing he walks back with his head down like an old hurdler. It's just on the way out to race or work that he is a handful."
Last year's Hong Kong Sprint winner usually parades calmly at Sha Tin but is barely controllable while moving through tunnels on the way to the racetrack. The two-time Group One-winner once broke a handler's collarbone while walking to morning trackwork, dragging him into a concrete wall.
After cantering a lap of Kranji's polytrack yesterday, O'Sullivan and his assistant Pierre Ng Pang-chi unsaddled Aerovelocity and took him to the parade ring behind Kranji's main grandstand.
A mafoo led Aerovelocity through two laps of the spacious parade ring, before taking the six-year-old through the tunnel and onto the track without incident.
Ng said Aerovelocity had been relatively well behaved with a similar set-up at Chukyo racecourse before winning the Takamatsunomiya Kinen and hopes they have the right plan to get jockey Purton aboard safely before Sunday's S$1million Group One Krisflyer Sprint.
"We will have a lead pony head out in front of him, at a safe distance, and hopefully that distracts him and he focuses on trying to get at the horse in front of him," Ng said. "We can't leg Zac aboard in the parade ring because the horse just gets too fired up and is uncontrollable."
