Beau Arrow wins over trainer Matthew Dunn after shaky start

BEAUDESERT trainer Matthew Dunn shoots for his first Saturday city success at Doomben this weekend with a horse he nearly gave up on.

Beau Arrow has impressively won both of his starts and is set to start favourite in the St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School Benchmark 70 Handicap.

The son of Love Conquers All did not have his first race start until he was a late four-year-old after it was thought for a long time he wasn’t a racing prospect.

“There were a few things that went wrong and he’d had a tie-back operation before we got him,” Dunn said. “We were nearly going to cut our losses at one stage.

“He’s actually a half-brother to (this year’s Magic Millions fancy) Jonker. When Jonker started going well and we worked out we had the half-brother we decided to get stuck into him a bit.

“We had the wind problem checked out and the vet said ‘just race him’, so we put him in work and his wind just kept getting better and better. The first time we galloped him we realised he went pretty good and then he won a jumpout and next thing he won his first start.

“Last time (at start number two) he made it look very easy.”

Dunn has been training 18 months after years working as a breaker and pre-trainer, mixed in with playing polo and camp drafting.

He now has 10-12 horses in work and training is a full time job.

“When I was pre-training, sometimes I would have them for 12 weeks, then they would go to the trainer and win a trial after only a week back in the stable,” he said. “So I thought I may as well have a go at it myself.”

Dunn has consistently been confused with his Murwillumbah namesake, who runs a much bigger operation just south of the border, but the mix-ups aren’t as frequent as they used to be.

“For the first year and a half I’d often have a first starter or something like that and it would come up really short in the market,” he said. “I could never work out why, but obviously they thought it was the other Matt Dunn.

“It gets confusing every now and then, but it seems to happen less often now.”

If Beau Arrow can win on Saturday it will go a long way to ending the confusion.

“I’ve had a couple of Saturday city runners, but they had little luck both times,” he said.

“Hopefully this bloke can do the job for us. He’s clearly on top of the list of horses I’ve trained so far.”