Puissance De Lune won the 2012 Queen Elizabeth II Stakes like a horse possessed. Punters couldn’t believe it, and neither could jockey Glen Boss.
It was a dominant five length win, and it dominated racing talk for a month. Boss immediately said ‘PDL’ would win the Melbourne Cup, and bookmakers followed suit, installing the big grey stallion as immediate favourite.
His single run in the autumn, in the Group 2 2013 Blamey Stakes was strong – a dead-heat, coming from the tail of the field. It wasn’t enormous, but it was damn good for a first-up run at shorter than ideal distance.
Then came the spring. Pundits and commentators gave their opinions of how to manage the horse. One that stuck in my mind was to give him just one or two lead-up runs ahead of the Cup. He clearly goes well fresh, so keep the focus.
But Darren Weir and connections elected to start him early. August 17th, in fact – 80 days before the Melbourne Cup, in the P.B Lawrence Stakes over 1400m. He duly won. But the PB Lawrence is no Cup lead-up.
The last time a Lawrence winner even ran in the Melbourne Cup was in 1992, when Subzero finished sixth.
Far worse – none of the 64 winners of the Lawrence Stakes, which was first run in 1949 as the J.J. Liston Stakes, have gone on to win the Melbourne Cup later in their campaign.
Horse Racing has been competitive enough and have enough history that the record books are a strong guide.
Why was Puissance De Lune running about then, if the Melbourne Cup was his focus?
Ultimately, I’m reminded of So You Think, when he went to the UK. It took master trainer Aidan O’Brien until the end of his career to figure out he trained and ran So You Think too long, too hard and too often.
They ran Puissance too early, too hard, and too often. And now, the $3.6 million dollar winner’s cheque will go elsewhere.
I was challenged when putting this piece together that Fiorente has been on a similar path. But there are just enough differences. Gai Waterhouse started his Spring campaign two weeks later, in the Memsie Stakes. Green Moon was fifth in the Memsie in 2012, before winning the Melbourne Cup – proof that it can be a perfect springboard.
The major difference is that Fiorente has had one less run than Puissance – the grey running twice in September in the Makybe Diva (September 7th) and Underwood Stakes (September 21st), while Fiorente was only taken to the races for the Dato’tan Chin Nam, before they went head to head in the Turnbull.
Perhaps I’m being overly harsh – Puissance suffered an untimely injury and judgments are difficult to make from afar, and possibly foolish. But the way the mighty grey overraced early in the Cox Plate suggests either something was amiss or he’d had enough for the Spring.
The overwhelming feeling is that PDL could’ve won, if he’d been given a Cup only focus.
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