Hong Kong’s brilliant three-year-old sprinter Aethero will make an eagerly-awaited return to the fray in today’s Gr2 Sprint Cup at Sha Tin with Gr1 glory and a legend’s benchmark blinking on the radar.
Aethero is one of Hollywoodbets Racing Ambassador Anthony Delpech’s best bets for the meeting – where rain is forecast and the going may be easier than in recent weeks.
Click here to read what Anthony Delpech suggests
Aethero is on the up
The Hong Kong Jockey Club reports that the John Moore-trained Aethero is only two points shy of the 121 rating the great Silent Witness achieved as a three-year-old in 2003 – the highest Hong Kong rating this century for a horse of that age – and if his weekend assignment doesn’t improve his own domestic mark of 119 (his international rating is already 120), a big run in the Gr1 Chairman’s Sprint Prize at the end of the month just might.
“Silent Witness has a statue in front of the grandstand, we all know what a great horse he was, so for Aethero to be rated only two pounds behind his three-year-old rating, that’s already impressive,” Moore said.
Aethero, for all his sizzling precocity, has a long way to go if he’s to come anywhere close to the overall achievements of Hong Kong’s all-time banner horse. But, putting aside comparisons with an untouchable, what he has done already places him on a pedestal of lofty expectation.
