Symmetry for Devil Night as he aims to avenge his great grandsire’s Golden Slipper misfortune

Things didn’t go to plan in the 1999 Golden Slipper for raging pre-post favourite Redoute’s Choice, but Yulong is hoping for better luck with the champion stallion’s great grandson Devil Night, the first colt to win a Blue Diamond at his second start this century.

Twenty-six years ago, Redoute’s Choice was a raging hot favourite for the Golden Slipper.

The powerfully built Danehill colt had won a Chairman’s Stakes and backed up a week later to win the Group 1 Blue Diamond at just his second start, and doing so he scored the first of multiple enthralling victories over his would-be racetrack sparring partner Testa Rossa.

Ahead of the Golden Slipper of 1999 and the late Rick Hore-Lacy’s Redoute’s Choice was in the red at 10/9 on (that’s $1.90 in the not-so-new decimal age) when the most ill-timed and unfortunate elevated temperature struck down the looming champion on race morning.

His wily and fearless punting trainer was left with no option but to scratch Redoute’s Choice from a probable $1.5 million Rosehill windfall.

That glory instead went to another son of Danehill, Frank Cleary’s Catbird.

There have been eight Slipper winners since to feature Redoute’s Choice in their pedigrees, one son, one daughter, two grandsons, three grand-daughter and a great grand son, but none of them with quite the parallels as this year;s leading chance, Devil Night.  

Redoute’s Choice would have been 28 days between runs heading into his third start had he made it to the barriers on March 27, 1999.

His great grandson, the $1.4 million Yulong-owned Devil Night, will attempt to become the sixth Blue Diamond-Golden Slipper winner since the world’s richest two-year-old race’s inception in 1957, a feat not achieved since Sepoy’s double in 2011.

Devil Night, a colt by Redoute’s Choice’s grandson Extreme Choice, hasn’t started for 28 days.

Team Hawkes of sons Michael and Wayne and their Hall Of Fame father John are notoriously patient and Yulong general manager Vin Cox says Devil Night’s name plate on his stable at Zhang Yuesheng’s growing stallion barn in Victoria is already minted.

Thus, if there was any reason to spell the lightly raced Devil Night prior to the Slipper he would have been sent to the paddock, but instead he was transported back to the Hawkes’ Rosehill stable and given a quiet private jump out last week to prepare him for his biggest race day test.

“It’s a lot easier said than done and we’re just thrilled to bits that we have landed on a horse of this quality, and to win a Blue Diamond at his second start, it is a feat that has only been done by his great-grandfather,” says Cox of the Kingstar Farm-bred colt, the first yearling colt purchased in Australia by Zhang to have won a Group 1. 

“Having his third start in a Slipper, it’s pretty exciting to have a horse of that calibre who is by an absolutely outstanding sire in Extreme Choice and is out of a Shamardal mare, so he’s got a brass plate already being made for one of the doors in the stallion barn at Yulong.

“We hope we can develop his career into the future.” 

A $9 chance in Slipper betting, in which beaten Todman Stakes favourite Wodeton remains at the top of the market at $4.50, Devil Night isn’t the only Yulong-owned colt out to enhance his stallion value at Rosehill on Saturday.

The year-older Growing Empire, three times Group 1-placed in the spring, will attempt to increase his stallion value in The Galaxy, Sydney’s 1100m Group 1 feature sprint of the season.

In doing so, the Zoustar colt is bypassing the Group 1 William Reid in Melbourne over 1200m.

And there’s a major contributing factor why Yulong and trainer Ciaron Maher elected to head to Sydney rather than staying in Melbourne for the William Reid at Moonee Valley, the scene of his narrow defeat in the Group 1 Manikato last spring: James McDonald.

The premier Sydney jockey has not ridden the colt in any of his 10 starts, with Mark Zahra in the saddle for Growing Empire’s past three runs, a third in the spring’s Coolmore Stud Stakes, a seventh first-up in the Lightning and a last-start fourth in the Newmarket Handicap, all down the Flemington straight course.

“He’s off to The Galaxy with a change of jockey, so we look forward to seeing what he can do, and hopefully turn his form around,” Cox says of the McDonald booking. 

“He’s been running well without hitting the bullseye.”

The handicap conditions of The Galaxy as opposed to the weight for age William Reid also appealed to Maher and connections for Growing Empire, a $700,000 Inglis Easter graduate in 2023 from the Vinery Stud draft.

“It’s fantastic that you can buy these yearling colts and develop them into stallion prospects,” says Cox, the Yulong general manager since late 2023.

“By being active at the yearling sales, you can (buy) these outcross stallions that you don’t normally have access to, so fingers crossed it can work out for us.”