BC Sprint winner Aloha West to be farm-rested prior to 2022 campaign
Breeders’ Cup Sprint winner Aloha West’s campaign adds a new dimension to the term “career year.”
The 4-year-old colt’s entire career has been compressed into calendar year 2021.
Aloha West’s season began in February at Oaklawn Park with a debut maiden win and, it turns out, ended Nov. 6 at Del Mar with the narrowest of victories in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint.
Aloha West posted a timed workout Nov. 24 at Fair Grounds and was mentioned as a possible runner in the Grade 1 Cigar Mile on Dec. 4 at Aqueduct, but connections wound up passing that spot, and on Tuesday, trainer Wayne Catalano said Aloha West wouldn’t start again this year.
“I just didn’t think he was ready for that race,” Catalano said of the Cigar Mile. “He’s fine. We did scans on him and everything, just to check him out, and everything is good. He just needs a little time.”
Catalano said Aloha West will get a 45-day break at a Louisiana farm before rejoining his string at Fair Grounds. There were post-Breeders’ Cup rumblings about a trip to Saudi Arabia in February, but that idea has been nixed, Catalano said. “You go internationally, it takes a long time to get over that,” he said.
Instead, Aloha West will be aimed at a domestic campaign, and if all goes well, he ought to be ready to race again in April.
By Hard Spun out of Island Bound, by Speightstown, Aloha West as an unraced colt trained in California with Bob Baffert, breezing 20 times at Los Alamitos and Santa Anita in 2019 and 2020 without making a start. Aloha West’s last California workout came in June 2020 and when he showed up on the work tab again five months later it was at Churchill Downs for Catalano.
Aloha West finished fifth in his second start, after which Aron Wellman’s Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners bought the colt privately from his original owners, Gary and Mary West.
Aloha West had been fourth in the $107,000 Kelly’s Landing Stakes in June at Churchill Downs and a close second in October in the Grade 2 Phoenix at Keeneland, but the BC Sprint marked his first stakes win – and the end of an improbable year of development.