Jerardi: Contention runs deep in Excelsior
The Excelsior Stakes at Aqueduct may be just a Grade 3 with a $200,000 purse, but only one of the eight horses has not reached triple digits.
Dick JerardiApr 23, 2015
The Excelsior Stakes at Aqueduct may be just a Grade 3 with a $200,000 purse, but only one of the eight horses has not reached triple digits.
When Wicked Strong returned to New York from south Florida last winter, he won the Grade 1 Wood Memorial at Aqueduct, earning the best Beyer Speed Figure of his career.On Saturday, his connections will be hoping for a similar result, as in his first start since returning from another winter in south Florida, Wicked Strong heads a field of eight entered in the Grade 3, $200,000 Excelsior Stakes at Aqueduct.
Going into last year’s Grade 3 San Francisco Mile at Golden Gate Fields, handicappers were lamenting trainer Alex Paszkeicz’s bad luck.
Ft Davis (#7, ML 8-1) will return to action in Thursday’s sixth race at Keeneland, a 1 1/8-mile turf allowance. It will be his first start since a fifth-place finish by 5 1/4 lengths in an about 1 1/8-mile turf allowance Feb. 7 at Fair Grounds. The first-, third-, and eighth-place finishers from that race came back to win their next starts.
I’m Workin On It, the most exciting 3-year-old filly stabled at Prairie Meadows, makes her stakes debut in Saturday’s $75,000, six-furlong Goldfinch Stakes.
In Saturday’s Last Tycoon Stakes at Santa Anita, I’m interested in Ganesh and Quick Casablanca, who are suitably stretching out off their seasonal debuts three weeks ago in the one-mile Thunder Road Stakes, which was an obvious prep since both prefer much longer distances.
Trainer Mark Casse will take two shots at the co-featured eighth race at Woodbine on Saturday, when he runs Conquest Titan and Constantino in the second-level optional claimer going 6 1/2 furlongs.
A fairly quiet opening to the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co. spring 2-year-olds in training sale was quickly left in the dust during Wednesday’s second session, highlighted by a Tapit filly who sold for $1.9 million to become the most expensive offering in the auction company’s history.
Despite a brutal winter in which 16 racing cards at Aqueduct were canceled due to weather and all-sources handle was down $85 million on its own product, the New York Racing Association claims that its revenue loss in the first quarter wasn’t that much worse than it had forecasted.
Derick Giwner's analysis of the Friday 4/24 card at The Meadowlands.