Duais

Queensland Oaks · Australian Cup · Tancred Stakes

She was bred by her owners, brought to Edward as a young filly, and by the end of her career had won $4 million in stakes prizemoney before selling for millions more off the track. Shamus Award was her sire — a stallion yet to prove himself at the time. Nobody was predicting anything.Edward was.

“I thought she was a three-year-old Oaks filly in the waiting,” he says. “I’ve even got the videos at the time to prove it.”

She was gangly and immature through her early work. Her first trial as a two-year-old, she was beaten ten lengths. That was the plan — building race craft, accumulating experience, never asking more of her than she was ready to give. Before her first race start she came up with a large abscess under her jaw, a possible indicator of strangles, one of the most infectious diseases in a racing stable. Permission from the stewards was required just to run her. She ran second that day against older horses.

The first real sign of the engine came after her second jump out. A rider came back to the yard and said: “Oh my God, I can’t believe what I just felt.” It was a haphazard gallop. It didn’t matter. Everyone took notice.

Three or four months after Duais arrived, her older half-sister won a stakes race on the Sunshine Coast. Overnight, a filly with modest breeding became the best-bred horse in the stable. “All of a sudden we had the half-sister to a Group winner,” Edward says. The confidence he had always had now had the pedigree to match.

Seven days out from the Australian Cup, Hawkesbury was underwater.

The rain bombs that hit Sydney that autumn had filled the dams, raised the bores, flooded the course proper. No track access on Saturday. Duaisneeded to work.

Sunday morning, the polytrack was sitting above the floodwater — usable, if you could reach it. Edward slid open the gate, legged Alex onto Duais, and led them both through knee-high water the full length of the inside of the course. Six or seven hundred metres of it, trotting. Just the three of them: Edward, Alex, and Rick.

She got onto the polytrack and worked Melbourne way. It was the best gallop of her preparation.

“I called the track manager and said, ‘Did you see that?’” Edward recalls. “He said, ‘Yeah, mate. Looked all right, didn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Mate, if you weren’t on before, get on now.’”

She won the Australian Cup.

Bart Cummings won that race thirteen times. Neither Anthony Cummingsnor James had won it — both had run seconds. For roughly twelve months, Edward was the only other member of the family to have done it.Then James won it twice in succession. “I think he targeted it because of that,” Edward says. “He was like, ‘Bugger this. We’re winning that race.’”

The Queensland Oaks sits alongside Winx on the honour roll. The Tancred Stakes completed the Group 1 trifecta.

After the Melbourne Cup she came home with a chip in her fetlock. The whole prep had felt difficult — problems Edward couldn’t account for, a horse working well enough to suggest something was still there but not quite delivering it.

He brought her back anyway. “I was convinced she still had more to offer,” he says. “It was a painful process, but very well engineered.” Three separate trial sessions, roughly two weeks apart, then two weeks into her first-up run at 2000 metres weight for age. She ran fourth in the Doomben Cup, beaten less than two lengths. Returning from surgery, first-up at that distance, against the best in the country — it was one of her best performances.

She is retired to stud now. Her first progeny are coming through.

“She represents such a wonderful part of my life and career,” Edward says. “It wasn’t all smooth sailing. But that’s what helps you put the tougher times into perspective.”

For Myrtle House, Duais is not a story about a famous name or a fashionable sire or a horse that arrived with expectation attached. She is a story about a home-bred filly whose owners believed enough to bring her, a trainer who saw what she could become before she had done anything to earn it, and the work — patient, specific, daily — that closed the gap between the two.

THE RECORD

$4 million Career stakes prize money

Sold for millions Off the track

3 Group 1 wins Queensland Oaks · Australian Cup · Tancred Stakes

Queensland Oaks On the honour roll alongside Winx

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