Young Werther out of Melbourne Cup

[Wandering Eyes]

Danny O’Brien said he and connections of Young Werther (NZ) (Tavistock) are “glass half-full” about the decision to spell the young stayer, claiming it was better to know of a potential problem rather than not.

O’Brien confirmed on Monday that the four-year-old’s mandatory CT scan had shown “an area of concern” and although the stayer has presented sound all spring, he said he was positive about the decision to opt out of next Tuesday’s Melbourne Cup.

“The protocols are there for exactly these situations – to pick up things that you wouldn’t have found through your normal veterinary procedures,” O’Brien said.

“He certainly has presented very sound all spring and his whole career really. There have been no real issues that we’ve had to manage but the bone scan just identified a little lesion in a sesamoid that presented as a risk.

“The advice we are getting is give him eight or 10 weeks out and we play on from there.

“He’s only a young horse. He’s just turned four and we are going to be glass half-full on it.

“If we didn’t have these protocols we wouldn’t have known. There is probably only a very small risk that he could aggravate it but we would rather not take that risk anyway.”

Young Werther ran as a $16 chance when eighth in the Caulfield Cup at his latest outing.

His scratching from the Cup has left the 2019 winning trainer with just one chance left in the form of his VRC Oaks winner Miami Bound (NZ) (Reliable Man), who ran fifth last Saturday in the Moonee Valley Cup.

“I thought she was OK,” O’Brien said of her Valley run. “It was just a grinding two-mile-in-waiting run but she’s going well enough to take her spot.”

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