A hat-trick of wins in Sydney has earned promising three-year-old Grebeni a trip north for his first shot at stakes company in the Group 3 Winx Guineas at the Sunshine Coast.
The gelding has had an almost faultless preparation, narrowly beaten first-up at Kembla Grange before stringing together a midweek win at Warwick Farm with successive Saturday-grade victories at Rosehill.
After pleasing the team since his most recent performance, trainers Gerald Ryan and Sterling Alexiou have opted to send Grebeni to Queensland to test the waters in one of the final black-type races of the season.
“Just the way he came through that race convinced us to run,” Ryan said.
“He’ll go up on Wednesday night, Ryan Maloney is riding him and then he will have a spell up there.”
The Winx Guineas (1600m) will be an important test for Grebeni as the stable has aspirations to tackle the $1 million The Gong (1600m) at the back end of the spring carnival.
He will have to adjust to a 200m distance drop on Saturday, but after a chat with jockey Kerrin Mcevoy, who has ridden him to his past two wins, Ryan doesn’t foresee it as an issue.
“He’s a horse who doesn’t do a lot of work and Kerrin said that in his opinion, it would be easy to do because he’s got a turn of foot and I haven’t tried to train that turn of foot out of him,” Ryan said.
Ryan also expects Grebeni to revert to his usual pattern of camping off the speed after he made the running last start.
While he got the job done, the performance was arguably not as impressive as his previous effort when he pounced on the leaders from midfield.
“He only led the other day because there was a lack of speed in the race and I wouldn’t think he’d have enough speed to lead a 1600 metre race,” he said.
“I’d like to see him settle back, wind up and hit the line rather than being up front and being the hunted.”
Grebeni came up with gate 18 in the bumper field of 18 plus three emergencies and was a $4.20 favourite on Wednesday, just ahead of Gold Coast Guineas and Gunsynd Classic placegetter Soothsayer ($4.60), who has barrier three.