Nigel Soult photo

Sheer Desire was a 1:49.4 winner in the Kentucky Sire Stakes final earlier this month at The Red Mile.

“For whatever reason, he just seems to like it down in Lexington,” explained Ron Burke, who is the colt’s conditioner and the leading money-winning trainer in North America this year with more than $10.6 million in the bank. “It is his track. When he went down there this year he was kind of struggling, but he righted the ship and got himself good again.

“He ended up with a blood infection, and we didn’t know it until it finally came out in his neck,” Burke continued. “He was so sore that he actually couldn’t be checked up properly because it made him uncomfortable. Finally, right before the Adios it abscessed and the Adios Consolation was the first time we thought the horse was starting to act better.”

Burke thinks Sheer Desire contracted the infection sometime before he shipped to Canada in June to compete in the North America Cup. Normally, the gelding is a rather high strung individual that doesn’t need to be pushed along by his pilot, but the horse was quite flat and seemed to have no will to put himself in the race.

“Usually you are not worried about firing him up, but instead you need to worry about calming him down,” he said. “He wasn’t himself up there and was just dull. They (the vets) said the infection he had in his system attached itself to the right side of his jugular vein and that it was very rare. They hadn’t seen anything like it before and we couldn’t figure it out until we ultrasounded his neck.

“We lanced it and some stuff came out, but it kept getting bigger and bigger until it finally abscessed,” Burke continued. “Since then everything has turned around for the horse.”

His connections had already abandoned any high hopes for Sheer Desire’s 2009 season and were just going to concentrate on bringing him back as an Open horse as a 4-year-old, but since the gelding has rebounded, they decided to press on and drop his name in the box for the Jug. They realize he will be considered an outsider, however, Burke feels now that the horse is sound and he belongs.

“I liked that he handled Carnivore pretty easily down in Lexington and Well Said finished right outside of Carnivore too (in defeating him by a quarter length in a Sept. 12 division of the Simcoe Stakes),” he said. “That tells me we have closed the gap on some of these horses and even though we are by no means the favorite, he has a chance.”

Regardless of what transpires at Delaware, Sheer Desire will be pointed towards several future contests at The Red Mile.

“We are actually anxious to get him back to Lexington to try him against the top colts in the Bluegrass and the (Tattersalls Pace),” Burke, who also has Straight Shooting in the Jug, said.