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Winning the Kentucky Derby is extremely difficult. Just getting one to the starting gate on the first Saturday in May is nearly as hard. On Wednesday morning, just 81 hours before Kentucky Derby 152 was to go to post, trainer Mark Casse revealed that Silent Tactic will have to scratch from the race due to a bruised foot.
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If their most recent starts had turned out a little better, Paradise and On Time Girl might have found themselves competing in the Grade 1 Kentucky Oaks on Friday at Churchill Downs. Instead, the Brad Cox-trained stablemates will turn back to seven furlongs and square off against one another and seven other 3-year-old fillies in the $700,000 Eight Belles Stakes.
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Not only did Gezora win the Prix de Diane, France's Oaks, last summer, she capped her 3-year-old campaign by winning the Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Turf. Not just a second Breeders' Cup but a championship season – that's where the bar's set when Gezora returns from a winter break in the Grade 3, $500,000 Modesty Stakes at Churchill Downs on Friday.
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While White Abarrio and Sovereignty prepare for their second meeting in the Grade 1 Stephen Foster here in two months, trainers Saffie Joseph Jr. and Bill Mott will send out two of their other high-profile older horses when Skippylongstocking and Baeza meet in Friday's Grade 2, $750,000 Alysheba Stakes at Churchill Downs.
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Brendan Walsh knows what a Kentucky Oaks winner looks like. For three seasons he had champion Pretty Mischievous, winner of the 2023 filly classic, in his barn, and knew her every detail. He likes what he's seen from Bella Ballerina as she prepares for the 2026 Oaks.
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The 152nd edition of the Grade 1, $1.5 million Kentucky Oaks will take less than two minutes to run beneath the lights Friday night at Churchill Downs. But it takes more than those two minutes to win the Oaks. Details will matter in an extraordinarily well-matched Oaks field in which six fillies were made between 4-1 and 8-1 on the morning line.
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Silent Tactic, winner of the Grade 3 Southwest Stakes and runner-up to Renegade in the Grade 1 Arkansas Derby, will scratch from the Kentucky Derby due to a bruised foot, trainer Mark Casse said Wednesday.
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Shisospicy, the champion female sprinter of 2025, makes her delayed return to the races Friday at Churchill Downs, but the Grade 2, $500,000 Unbridled Sidney Stakes is no soft-landing spot. The multiple graded winner and defending Unbridled Sidney winner Queen Maxima heads the list of eight challengers Shisospicy will have to contend with in the 5 1/2-furlong turf sprint stakes.
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One year ago, Drexel Hill and Bless the Broken finished second and third in the Kentucky Oaks, and on Friday, in the La Troienne Stakes, they meet for the first time since that race. Yet it's a horse who ran seven hours before the Oaks, in the card's first race, that was installed as the 3-1 morning-line favorite in the Grade 1, $1 million La Troienne.
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A sixteenth of a mile isn't that far, just 330 feet. It's the difference between the one-mile Appalachian Stakes four weeks ago at Keeneland and Friday's 1 1/16-mile Edgewood Stakes at Churchill Downs, where Imaginationthelady will need just a little more than two feet to close the gap between Storm's Wake and her from the Appalachian.
