Mountaineer: Kentucky shippers Revelstoke, Strike Impact take turf co-features

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Revelstoke, with Deshawn Parker aboard, scores her first win on turf in the Firecracker.

Logical horses shipping in from Kentucky swept the first two stakes of the season Tuesday night at Mountaineer.

Revelstoke, a 4-year-old filly based at the Thoroughbred  Training Center near Keeneland, cruised to a 4 3/4-length score in the $75,000 Firecracker for fillies and mares going a mile on turf.

One race later, heavy favorite Strike Impact ($3.60), an 8-year-old Churchill-based gelding, rallied to get up by a neck over Sal the Barber in the $75,000 Independence Day, also at one mile on turf.

Revelstoke ($5.20) had been 0 for 8 on grass, but ran well in several of those races, including a pair of seconds locally last year in the Firecracker and the West Virginia President’s Cup.

“She has been a very consistent filly, although somewhat unlucky,” said Jimmy Corrigan, Revelstoke’s Irish-born trainer. “There have been races where Revelstoke got crowded, where other horses blocked her path.”

Owned by the Souped Up Stables of Thomas Campbell, Revelstoke was ridden by Deshawn Parker and completed the mile on a firm but slow course following afternoon rain in 1:36.97. Zaphyra, making her first start since February, finished second. American Romance and the maiden Maid On a Mission finished in a dead heat for third.

In the Independence Day, Strike Impact overcame traffic trouble that caused him to steady in the stretch to earn the first stakes victory of his 66-race career.

“He’s a hard-trying horse,” said Strike Impact’s trainer, Patrick J. Dupuy. “He gets beaten sometimes, but he’s been in against some tough company. And he’s the soundest horse I’ve ever trained in my life.”

Strike Impact, ridden by John McKee, was third when he got pinned along the rail at the three-sixteenths pole and had to steady. McKee swung Strike Impact out four paths from the rail and he closed furiously to just overtake Sal the Barber and Brian Hernandez Jr.  It was three lengths back to Taino in third.

Strike Impact, third in the Grade 3 Col. Bradley at Fair Grounds in January, ran the mile in 1:36.78.