Elite Status© Photo Healy Racing
Elite Status blew the rest away and set himself up for Royal Ascot in streaking to success in the Highclere Castle Gin Carnarvon Stakes at Newbury.
Karl Burke’s 13-2 chance was ridden by Clifford Lee for the six-furlong Listed feature and travelled well from the off.
At the head of the field from an early stage, the Sheikh Obaid-owned colt pulled further and further away from his rivals and although Relief Rally, the 3-1 favourite, challenged behind him she could not get close and was two and three-quarter lengths adrift on the line.
“I’ve always thought he was a high-class horse and I think if we can keep him on the right track, the world is his oyster,” said Burke from his Middleham base.
“He is a very good horse with a massive engine, we just lost our way with him.
“He’s one of these horses that just catches the point of his sesamoid at the back of the joint there. They are horrible and when they start catching them they catch them every time and they go sore really quickly. It’s like having a stone in your shoe or a bad nail in your foot and you keep catching it.
“A few performances last year were disappointing, but it was probably Deauville in the bad ground last summer where it started and we never really got him back properly at the backend of the year.
“He was electric in the National Stakes and after that performance it was hard to step up to six furlongs, so we went for the Norfolk (at Royal Ascot). Sheikh Obaid was always very keen to step him up and probably rightly so, but when we did eventually step him up he was never quite right for us.
“He’s proved there today he stays six very well. He’s a horse with a big future, I think, and the Commonwealth Cup will definitely be his next run barring accidents.
“It wasn’t a question of us wanting to make the running today, but what we didn’t want to do was pull him around and take a chance of him banging himself.
“Clifford was under instruction to get into a nice rhythm, let him use his big, long stride he’s got and sit comfortably. Clifford pulled it off to perfection and he doesn’t have to make the running – if he jumps and sits second or third that’s fine. He showed in the National Stakes the turn of foot he has got.”
Tom Marquand took the ride on Relief Rally for William Haggas and said of her performance: “It was nice to see her back to last year’s self there, I thought, and she came with a real strong run.
“The winner was very fast on the front-end, he really kicked and went on.”
