By MIKE DILLON
It's going to arrive 72 hours too early for Bart Cummings, but he'll take it anyway.
Cummings is doing it tough with the prospect of not having a runner in the Melbourne Cup for the second successive year.
You could see the pensive expanse behind the piercing Cummings persona at the Flemington trackwork session yesterday.
But if Cummings can't have another look at the race he's made his own, the prize for the $A1.25 million Victoria Derby he is favoured to win with Ustinov will do just nicely as a substitute.
Most owners would say their lives had changed if they won the Victoria Derby, Ustinov's owner Dennis Marks won't even be square with the stud fees he's spent on his Melbourne Cup-winning mare Let's Elope.
The champion mare has left it late to prove the old line that if you want a champion breed the best to the best and hope.
Marks just about ran out of hope by the time Ustinov first started to show he was not a milk carter.
Let's Elope bled in the Japan Cup and Marks decided to retire her and send her to the best stallions available.
He spent $240,000 sending her to Danzig to get a stakes-placed filly in France, Yes I Will, now retired to stud in Australia.
Over The Moon came next after a $240,000 date with Storm Cat. He won one in France and is currently racing in Australia, where he is yet to win.
He then sent Let's Elope to world champion sire Seeking The Gold, sire of unquestionably the world's best racehorse of the last decade, Dubai Millennium.
That cost $500,000, and the resulting colt will go round Flemington tomorrow as the hot favourite for the Victoria Derby.
Ustinov is lucky to be racing in Marks' colours - he decided to keep the results of only the first three matings of Let's Elope.
"I have invested a lot in this," said Marks this week in one of the great understatements.
If Marks has invested plenty so has Cummings via more than half a century of experience in training some of Australia's finest thoroughbreds.
Start talking to Cummings about Ustinov and the admiration the Cups King retains for only his best starts to shine through.
"Early on his was slow and backward, but the signs were there."
Well, they were if you are a Bart, and there's only one of him.
"You just had to look at him - the conformation.
"Where he needed to improve was his attitude, now there's not a bad bone in his body."
If he gets over the line first tomorrow there won't be an inexpensive bone in his body, either.
A Derby winning son of the world's best stallion out of a Melbourne Cup-winning mare has some attraction as a stud prospect.
If you wanted an indication of how highly regarded Dubai Milliennium was before his untimely demise you needed to be alongside his former trainer Saeed bin Suroor at Sandown yesterday.
He might have been fielding questions about the quality of horses Godolphin stable has brought to Australia for the Melbourne Cup, but he couldn't help somehow dropping Dubai Millennium into it.
"We worked him with group one-winning horses and they were not good enough to stay with him in his training. He would leave them behind and still always finish in the bridle."
Ustinov won't finish in the bridle tomorrow - the 2500m of the Derby is about as tough as it gets for a 3-year-old at any stage of a season, let alone when some of them have not even turned three years old.
Cummings likes his Derby chances, but is as always coy.
"Yeah, he was pretty good the other day at Moonee Valley and Flemington is going to suit him better."
This is a race which is settled on temperament as much as talent and Ustinov settled brilliantly last weekend for Paddy Payne, suggesting Payne can again put him to sleep until well into the massive Flemington home straight.
The fascinating question on this Derby is how has Viscount come through what for a 3-year-old was a gut-busting effort to not only finish a close third to Northerly and Sunline in the Cox Plate, but to be hammered in the home straight for his trouble.
If there was two weeks between the races rather than one he may even leapfrog Ustinov for favouritism.
Damien Oliver's mount Amalfi is third favourite after an easy win on Caulfield Cup day, a race in which Oliver received a severe reprimand from chief steward Des Gleeson for taking it too easy in the closing stages.
"If he'd been beaten Damien wouldn't have had to worry about the Derby," said Gleeson.
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from Racing
The Cossack back on top at Te Rapa
"He’s got a huge heart and is the best winded horse you could have."