Anything Guidry rides a threat
CHICAGO - Derek Lee led the major leagues as of Tuesday with a .360 batting average. Big deal. Mark Guidry is batting .380 after almost a month of riding at Arlington.
Arlington held 19 races over the weekend, and Guidry won seven of them, including the $300,000 Washington Park Handicap with Perfect Drift, one of Guidry's four victories on Saturday's card. Arlington ran 11 turf races last week: Guidry rode in six of them, won four, and finished second in another. His timing and sense of pace on grass recently have been nearly flawless.
In last week's final turf race, a second-level allowance on Sunday, Guidry won with the 3-year-old Ready Ruler, who beat older horses while racing on the pace. Vinery Stable owns Ready Ruler, Steve Asmussen trains him, and in Thursday's featured fifth race those same connections send out the 3-year-old filly More Than Promised for her first try against older horses. Guidry, 4 for 7 riding Asmussen horses this meet, gets the call, and like Ready Ruler, More Than Promised gets things done on or near the lead.
has won only once on grass - she was disqualified from another win - but never has been worse than second in four turf starts. She has been freshened up since finishing second here in an overnight stakes June 19, and has worked five times between starts, twice breezing on grass. Still, More Than Promised is going to need a peak performance to beat Jennie R.
Aboard Jennie R. is leading rider Shaun Bridgmohan, who has maintained a 24 percent strike rate over nearly three months of this meet. Bridgmohan said when he arrived at Arlington this summer that he knew what to do with a live mount; he has backed that up again and again. He has also shown a well-honed skill set when he's on the right horse in a turf race.
looks like the right horse Thursday. She has finished second in her last three races, all second-level allowances on turf, but not because she's a hanger who consistently fails to show the needed late spark. Jennie R. has speed, but turns slightly rank when on an early lead, and that cost her last time out when she was beaten a half-length in a 1 1/8-mile race. She now turns back to a mile, and with a couple of stretch-out sprinters entered, Jennie R. and Bridgmohan can get covered up down the backstretch and around the far turn, just the ticket to a breakthrough performance.