Legendary trainer Bart Cummings always said there was a simple formula to getting racehorses to deliver on their potential: patience.
It is the cheapest thing in racing and the thing least often employed, as owners and trainers want to strike when the iron is hot with an in-form, fit galloper.
Plenty can go wrong with horses: freakish paddock accidents can put them out of action, as can sudden illness. A horse who is right at the peak of fitness can just as quickly lose the edge and go stale if left too long between runs.
It is a particularly fine judgment with a young inexperienced horse, one who is far from from the finished article. Particularly if he has plenty of ability and is good enough to win a group 2 race at only his fifth racecourse appearance.
But that is the call that well-known winemaker Wolf Blass, the owner of Saturday's Caulfield Autumn Classic winner Alpine Eagle, and the colt's trainer, Tony McEvoy, are going to have to make within the next couple of days.
Alpine Eagle still holds an engagement in next Saturday's Australian Guineas at Flemington, a group 1 contest over 1600 metres. While the trainer gave every indication that he wasn't all that keen to back up quickly, he did leave the door slightly ajar.
By High Chaparral (sire of, among others, So You Think) out of a New Zealand-bred mare by Zabeel, Alpine Eagle's pedigree screams of his potential as a stayer.
He certainly shaped like one on Saturday when, under the Damien Oliver drive, he needed every centimetre of the 1800-metre trip to justify the short odds that he had been backed down to to get up and beat Lee and Anthony Freedman's Minnesinger and the David Hayes/Tom Daberning-prepared Firehouse Rock.
He looks as though distances in excess of 2000 metres will be much more suitable, and he was, as McEvoy said afterwards, bought very much as a development project, the sort of colt who would only come into his own as a four and five-year-old when the big cups races could be his targets.
Alpine Eagle looked to be paddling and with it all to do at the top of the straight in the Autumn Classic as Firehouse Rock kicked into what looked like a race-winning lead under Nick Hall, but Oliver galvanised him and he answered every call, much to McEvoy's relief.
"For him to pick it up and win was incredible," the trainer said afterwards. "He's still in the Guineas next week, I will just let the dust settle, he will go home and have a freshen up and we will probably go towards the SA Derby.
"I have paid him up for the Guineas, but I need to let the horse do the talking. If he gets home and he is not his 100 per cent normal self in the next 48 hours (by Monday afternoon) he will be straight back to Adelaide," McEvoy said.
Whatever decision is made McEvoy and Blass look to have a serious prospect to go to war with later this year and next. The trainer, for so long a key cog in the Lindsay Park wheel, has now been training on his own behalf for a few years and splits his time between his Hawkesbury base and one in the Barossa Valley.
Although he lives now in NSW it is unlikely that Alpine Eagle will be aimed at the Sydney riches during The Championships. McEvoy firmly sees him as a potential Caulfield and Melbourne cups type.
"When I rang Wolf to see if he would buy him I said we are buying a four and five-year-old, and I am not going to rush him. Wolf was tremendous about that. He is still a work in progress.
"I don't think he's got the mindset to go to Sydney. I think I would prefer to go to the lower road. He wasn't actually bought for a derby, he was bought with cups in mind.
"He's a three-year-old with a two-year-old's mind, and I am just worried if I forget that I will ask him to do something he probably can't achieve. He almost gave the race away by wobbling around. He's making too many mistakes to be going to the elite level."
Maybe right now. But on this effort it could just be a matter of time.
