Four years after Castelvecchio finished third to Microphone in the Skyline Stakes, Richard Litt will saddle up another promising son of Dundeel in the same race, hopeful of a similar result.
While Tavs may never reach the heights of Litt’s two-time Group 1 winner and 2019 Cox Plate placegetter, he has made an encouraging start in his own right, unleashing a powerful finish to score over 1000m at Canberra on debut.
Litt saw enough in the effort to follow the same template he used with Castelvecchio and head to Saturday’s Skyline Stakes (1200m) at Randwick, although he admitted he wasn’t expecting to find himself back in the two-year-old shark tank with the colt.
“If you’d have told me he’d be running in a Skyline six or eight weeks ago I would have laughed,” Litt said.
“He has just come a little bit from left field, which is wonderful.
“It’s nice for (owners) the Gallettas, they breed a little bit and they’ve come up with a nice one.”
Also the owners of Castelvecchio, the Galletta family bred Tavs from their lightly-raced Beneteau mare Quattro Foglie, who won two of her three starts for Litt before a bowed tendon forced her early retirement.
Tavs didn’t jump out as a readymade two-year-old in his initial education and Litt was pleasantly surprised to see him overcome several obstacles at Canberra to score.
“Robbie (Dolan) trialled him twice and told me, ‘he’s got loads of ability. He’s potentially quite nice’,” Litt said.
“So I took his word for it because he didn’t show a lot at trackwork.
“I thought it was the right sort of race for him (in Canberra) but he’d drawn a bit poorly that day too and got right back, he missed the break a little bit.
“It was a very good effort to overcome all that and he has trained on well enough since.”
Tavs again has a wide draw in barrier 11 and will face much stiffer opposition in the form of Canonbury Stakes placegetter Shinzo and Godolphin’s Corniche, who filled the minors in two Blue Diamond lead-ups in Melbourne.
But if the youngster can be competitive, Litt hasn’t ruled out continuing on the Castelvecchio path towards the Group 1 Sires’ Produce (1400m) and Champagne Stakes (1600m).
“Absolutely. If it were coming to him easy enough and he was still doing well, we would consider those races if he put in a good show on Saturday,” he said.
As for any parallels between Tavs and Castelvecchio, Litt said they had little in common apart from sharing the same sire.
“They are very hard to compare. Castelvecchio was pretty special, he would be doing very well if he was half as good as him,” Litt said.