2011 Dubai World Cup Contenders Preview: Twice Over

With the world’s richest horse race less than a week away from us, we’ll be taking the next few days to get a firm gauge on how things are expected to shape up for this Saturday’s Dubai World Cup. A number of the leading ante post contenders have been withdrawn in recent days for a variety of reasons and, at the time of this writing, Snow Fairy (Intikhab), Bold Silvano (Silvano), and Byword (Peintre Celebre) have all been removed.

Twice Over (Observatory) remains the major betting favourite for this one and the Henry Cecil-trained six year-old horse made a major statement when conquering the third round of the Al Maktoum Challenge. This comes on the heels of his relatively forgettable run in 2010 when he finished a well-beaten tenth from fourteen.

In all honesty, that race was the only genuine blemish on Twice Over’s 2010 card with Group 1 scores in the Coral Eclipse and the Emirates Airlines Champion Stakes while hitting the board in the Prince of Wales’ Stakes, the Juddmonte International and the Irish Champion Stakes. In virtually all of those races, Twice Over deployed a trademark stalking trip.

Twice Over gets a real advantage in the World Cup thanks to the fact that the Tapeta surface at Meydan plays so similarly to a turf course rated “good” which is where he tends to run best. Tom Queally has forged a high-quality partnership with Twice Over and it will continue here.

This race could be the greatest iteration of the Dubai World Cup – a fact backed up by the cumulative $40,000,000+ in earnings that the starting lineup has amassed.

Twice Over is now trading at a 7/4 price for the outright victory and, while that’s certainly quite short, it is relatively justified thanks to the sheer quality on display last time out and the fact that he’s had a run over Meydan before so connections will know how to deploy him properly. He has the ability to post excellent fractions and then still find more on the run-in, and that seems to be the make-or-break factor with many of these high-profile contests at Meydan.

When the betting was initially unveiled for the Dubai World Cup ante post, the early standout was Cape Blanco (Galileo) who was priced at 3/1 and continues to hold steady at around 4/1 or 5/1 with most major bookmakers. Twice Over was originally floated at 9/2 but, once he showed up in the Middle East and unleashed such an impressive run in the Al Maktoum Challenge, the puntes knew he was for real and has been subsequently bet down to 7/4. Look for him to take even more volume if there is no negative news regarding his condition or form.