Anmaat (Ire) (Awtaad {Ire}) is said to be finished for the season following his victory in Saturday's G1 QIPCO Champion Stakes at Ascot, with Shadwell's racing manager Angus Gold hoping the six-year-old can continue to be a flagbearer for the operation in 2025.
The Owen Burrows trainee was among the outsiders for Saturday's £1.3 million feature contest at odds of 40-1, having managed only fifth when sent off the 6-5 favourite for the G2 Prix Dollar at Longchamp two weeks earlier.
In the event, however, Anmaat proved better than ever at Ascot as he overcame a troubled passage to gain the second top-level win of his career, running on strongly in the final furlong to beat Calandagan (Ire) (Gleneagles {Ire}) by half a length.
“Until his last run he'd never been out of the first three in five years of racing,” said Gold. “Had he not run in Paris and gone straight to Ascot from Haydock, then he probably would have been a 12-1 chance and not 40-1.
“He fluffed his lines in France, but at the same time he did run the fastest furlong of any of them between the two and the one. It was just unlike him not to finish off his race as he's such a tough horse.
“I don't think people realised what such a serious issue this horse had,” Gold added of the injury which sidelined Anmaat after his first Group 1 success in the Prix d'Ispahan at Longchamp in May last year. “He was in his box at Shadwell with his foot injury for months–he had almost a year out of training–so just to get him back at all was an achievement.
“To get him back to win was fantastic, but to win at the highest level is huge credit to an awful lot of people at Shadwell and Owen's yard–and massive credit to the horse himself. An awful lot wouldn't have come back from that.”
Anmaat was having only his third start of the campaign at Ascot on Saturday and Burrows did not rule out another run overseas in the immediate aftermath of that success, but Gold has now all but ruled out that possibility as the team look ahead to next year.
He continued, “To me, the position we are now in with the majority of our older horses likely to be retired, he could be our only flagbearer. Now he's proved he's a Group 1 horse here, he's a very important horse for us next year if Sheikha Hissa wants to keep him in training.
“I haven't had that conversation yet, but I can't see any reason why not as he's a gelding. I know he's about to turn seven, but he hasn't got a lot of mileage. She may want him to go to Dubai or Saudi, who knows, but from my point of view we want to be trying to win some big races in Europe and he's our number one.
“It's not like we've five or six three-year-olds next year to take over the mantle, he's the number one now and we've got to treat him accordingly.”
Not a subscriber? Click here to sign up for the daily PDF or alerts.
