Urban Ruler aiming for third-straight win

Tuesday 20 June 2017, 4:34pm

After a second-up failure by Urban Ruler at Flemington last month, trainer Greg Eurell was left scratching his head.

The trainer had the Silver Bowl Series Final for three-year-olds at Flemington in July as the ultimate goal for the gelding this campaign but wondered then whether they might have to lower their sights.

But Urban Ruler has since put together two strong wins at Pakenham and Flemington to reaffirm those plans and heads back to Flemington on Saturday for a 1600m-handicap against his own age.

Saturday's race serves as a heat of the Silver Bowl Series with the $120,000 final over 1600m two weeks later at the same track.

"His last two runs have been terrific," Eurell said.

"His second-up start, I was bitterly disappointed with him and couldn't really put my finger on what was wrong that day, but he has progressed from there.

"His win at Pakenham was very convincing and I thought if he could run in the money at his next start against the older horses at Flemington he would have done a good job."

Urban Ruler did better than that, sprinting clear over the final 200m of the 1400m benchmark-78 race on June 10 to win by 1-3/4 lengths.

"We just needed to have another run before we wanted to jump into one of these heats of the Silver Bowl Series, but the way he executed his last start I couldn't have been happier with him," Eurell said.

Urban Ruler's last-start win has pushed his rating up, meaning the gelding will carry top weight of 60kg on Saturday with Tom Sadler retaining the ride.

"It's never easy to carry weight but he is a big, strong horse and hopefully he can cope with it and run us another nice race," Eurell said.

"It's a big job to keep stringing the wins together but you had to like what he did last start and if he can draw a good barrier and jump into a similar position, you'd have to think he's in there with a fighting chance again."

– AAP

Latest News

Prime Thoroughbreds - We have a Host of Leaders in our Team

Tuesday, 29 June 2021

Prime Thor­ough­bred’s cur­rent rac­ing team is putt­ing to­gether quite a re­cord. We have 22 hors­es that have raced in our team at pre­sent. Six­teen of th­ese are win­n­ers in­clud­ing the Stakes win­n­ing trio Ru­bisa­ki, Fituese and Xtreme­time with Miss Di­vine Em and Miss In Charge run­n­ing 4th in Stakes races. This sees a stakes win­n­er to win­n­er ra­tio of 18.75% with a stake’s per­formed to win­n­er ra­tio of 31.25%. Th­ese are ex­cep­tio­n­al fig­ures.   More »

Freedmans land maiden Group One win

Saturday, 27 February 2021

Un­der-rat­ed fil­ly For­bid­den Love has emerged as an au­tumn car­ni­val smokey with a bril­liant per­for­mance to win the Sur­round Stakes at Rand­wick.  More »

Capriccio completes Damian Lane treble

Saturday, 27 February 2021

In a big day for coun­try-trained hors­es, War­r­nam­bool fil­ly Capric­cio has tak­en out the In­glis Dash for Daniel Bow­man.  More »

More news headlines »