Coeur Volante likely to target Qld

[Wandering Eyes]

Mike Moroney’s classy filly Coeur Volante (NZ) (Proisir) will miss the early part of the autumn carnival as she takes time to recover from a busy schedule in 2023.

Coeur Volante won three straight races last year, two of those at group level, before finishing fourth in the Gr.1 Thousand Guineas in the middle of November.

The Melbourne Cup-winning trainer suggested that, more broadly, it would be a quiet start to the autumn for his Flemington stable.

“We’re going to be more late autumn and into Queensland mainly,” Moroney said.

“We made a decision with our good filly Coeur Volante that we’d leave her out for a bit longer. She came off a short break and she’s pretty immature, so we just thought we’d miss the early part of the autumn and just join in the latter part, possibly on the way to Queensland.

“We’d like to think we could run in a Stradbroke, all going well.”

While it appears that Moroney won’t be a major player in the early features on this side of the Tasman in 2024, he has enjoyed plenty of success in New Zealand recently.

Moroney has recently returned to Australia from his time in his home country over the festive season and was there to see his smart three-year-old Pendragon (NZ) (U S Navy Flag) win the Gr.2 Auckland Guineas on Boxing Day.

The gelding by US Navy Flag will have his next start in the Karaka Million 3YO Classic on January 27, with Moroney suggesting that he thinks he’ll eventually travel to Australia to race here.

“He’ll be pretty hard to beat, I think, in the big three-year-old race there on Karaka night,” Moroney said.

“He won well when I was over there, won a Group 2 and won it well, and won the start before, too. He’s beaten the better three-year old’s; he’s still got to beat the horse that won the 1000 Guineas (Molly Bloom), but of the males, he’s beaten the rest of them.”

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