The Dubai World Cup Carnival 2019 continues and this Thursday it’s the turn of Buhwarui Banseok to take his chance. The Bart Rice trained 6-year-old runs in race 5, a handicap over 2000M on the Meydan turf.

There are a total of eleven runners with Godolphin providing no fewer than six of them but Buhwarui Banseok looks to have landed in a good spot compared with Ace Korea and Dolkong who faced group opposition on their respective debuts earlier this month. He is the only one in the field to be racing on turf for the first time but that may suit in the same way that it did another Korea-trained runner, Diferent Dimension, two years ago.

How he takes to the surface and the likely unfamiliar race pace will be crucial but Buhwarui Banseok has proven himself competitive amongst the best company in Korea. He will have South African jockey Bernard Fayd’Herbe aboard and has drawn the outside gate 11.

In addition to the Godolphin half-dozen, US trainer Kenny McPeek’s Harlan Strong makes his Carnival debut as does Ed Dunlop’s Dark Red. Aside from the UAE-based runners Earnshaw, Jaaref and Big Challenge, there’s not a lot of recent form to go on. Buhwarui Banseok’s latest outing was in the Grand Prix Stakes at Seoul in December when he finished 13th of 16 over 2300M but he was a very good winner of a stiff 1800M handicap at Busan in October. The wide draw shouldn’t affect him too much as he doesn’t need to lead and he generally runs on well. In total, the American bred horse, who is by Tizway, has won eight of his twenty-eight starts.

It’s a first Carnival runner for trainer Bart Rice who has been based at Busan since the end of 2013. Rice has saddled 150 Korean winners with a win strike rate of 13.4% and 36% of his runners finishing in the top three.

The race will come under orders at 8:50pm local UAE time on Thursday which is 1:50am on Friday morning in Korea.