CHICAGO BULL WILL BE BACK: MOORE
Prominent Harness Racing owner Glen Moore is bullish Chicago Bull will return to racing, despite being ruled out of the Fremantle and WA Pacing Cups early next year.
Speaking to RWWA Harness last Friday, trainer Gary Hall Snr confirmed the 2017 Fremantle and WA Pacing Cup champion wouldn’t be seen over the summer period.
The champion trainer hoped to have Chicago Bull back racing by the middle of next year, but was far from confident the seven-year-old would race again.
“He’s going out now for eight to 10 weeks,” Hall Snr said.
“He’s got strains to his suspensory and he’s got a little bit of a problem with his sesamoid bone on the off side front leg.
“What worried me more than anything about him when he came back is that he changed his action.
“I’ll probably give him three months to make sure and then bring him back in the middle of next year and get him ready for whatever races there are.”
Despite Hall Snr’s concerns, Moore was more optimistic on Chicago Bull returning to the track and said the gelding was capable of overcoming this setback.
“Suspensory injuries are always very tough ones,” he told TABradio.
“We’ve got it early enough and it is, according to the vet, very slight.
“They can exacerbate and come back and it may not heal 100 per cent.
“We’re going to give him every opportunity.
“They didn’t think he’d come back from the serious back bone injury that he had, then he came back and won three races.
“He’s pretty resilient.”
Meanwhile, Hall Snr’s star four-year-olds Major Trojan, Wildwest and Eloquent Mach are all having short breaks prior to the Golden Nugget in December.
Major Trojan, who Moore owns, produced the most underwhelming performance of his short, albeit successful, career in Perth when sixth in the Binshaw Pace on August 23.
Moore said he was confident Major Trojan, this year’s WA Derby winner, could bounce back in time for the Golden Nugget.
“In that race Eloquent Mach led and won and Major Trojan popped off the fence early,” he said.
“There was a bit of jostling and locking of carts and he dragged the cart for 100 metres.
“In that incident he cut his pastern and that would’ve hurt him at the time.
“He loomed up and couldn’t finish off.
“We’ve put him on the easy list for three weeks…we will keep him up to the mark without doing fast work.”
Tim Walker
