Leading Hong Kong trainer John Moore is planning to travel to Australia with his Singapore Gold Cup winner Dan Excel. Moore is keen for the impressive Dan Excel to contest this year’s Cox Plate, but cites horses not acclimatising and extended quarantine restrictions as major hurdles for international horses going to Australia.
Moore has told the South China Morning Post overnight he has a radical plan to beat both of those problems.
He intends to fly Dan Excel to Sydney in the next few weeks, complete quarantine while the horse is virtually spelling, complete that break at owner David Boehm’s Muskoka Farms outside Sydney, before doing a full preparation in Australia into the Cox Plate.
Moore’s brother Gary, who has been the champion trainer in Macau for five of the past seven seasons, will move to Sydney permanently in two months and he can take over the training of Dan Excel from his new Rosehill Gardens stables.
"We still need to talk with the Jockey Club about the logistics of it all but what we are thinking is to ship Dan Excel to Australia in a couple of weeks, do his quarantine, then he'll have a short break at David's Muskoka Farm property,” Moore told the SCMP.
"This way we get the horse into the country much earlier, he can get his quarantine done, acclimatise to the different time and environment and be properly prepared, which they need to be for races like the Cox Plate,” Moore said.
"He'll have three weeks of pre-training and go into Gary's stables at Rosehill Gardens to be trained, but still under my name, of course."
In the extended interview, Moore talks about potentially setting up satellite stables in both Sydney and Melbourne via his brother Gary.