Breeders' Cup Classic: Fierceness getting bigger, stronger as season progresses
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A year ago at this time, trainer Todd Pletcher wasn’t sure what to make of Fierceness.
After a dominant debut win at Saratoga, Fierceness flopped in the slop of the Grade 1 Champagne at Aqueduct, dimming his Breeders’ Cup prospects. Finding nothing wrong with Fierceness out of the race, Pletcher shipped him to Keeneland to train. If he trained well enough, then Pletcher would give the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile a shot.
Fierceness trained well enough and then, in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, ran beyond most people’s expectations to win the race by 6 1/2 lengths and clinch an Eclipse Award as champion 2-year-old male.
A year later, Fierceness has the definite look of a Breeders’ Cup horse and figures to be one of the favorites for the $7 million Classic. His back-to-back wins in the Jim Dandy and Travers at Saratoga have him at or near the top of the 3-year-old male division, whose co-leader, if you will, Dornoch, is now retired. The victory by Fierceness over the four-time Grade 1-winning filly Thorpedo Anna in the Travers was rated as one of the fastest races of the year on speed figures.
And to hear Pletcher tell it, those races have seemed to move Fierceness forward.
“I think physically you can see a change in him, he’s gotten bigger and stronger, gained weight,” Pletcher said. “That was my concern after the Jim Dandy. Off a big race like that, having not run since the [Kentucky] Derby, if it would move him forward or if he was going to need more time. Everything he did in between the Jim Dandy and the Travers told us it moved him forward.”
The way Fierceness came out of the Jim Dandy gave Pletcher confidence to come back in four weeks in the Travers. It took a little longer, but Fierceness has seemed to come out of the Travers in excellent shape, so much so that Pletcher wouldn’t have been afraid to have run in between.
“After the Travers I thought he was maybe a little more tired than he was after the Jim Dandy,” Pletcher said. “It took him a couple of days but didn’t take long to get back. I was thinking ‘Let’s stick to our game plan here’ but it would have been tempting to think about running him in between.”
Had Pletcher run Fierceness in between, the race of choice would have likely been the Grade 2 Woodward on Sept. 28. The Aqueduct main track came up sloppy that day, not the kind of track Fierceness would have liked. Moreover, Pletcher won the Woodward anyway with Tapit Trice, who, earlier this week, Pletcher confirmed for the BC Classic.
Crupi, who finished a well-beaten third in the Woodward, remains under consideration for the Classic, Pletcher said.
Fierceness is currently in Saratoga but after a workout this week could head to Keeneland to train along with Pletcher’s other Breeders’ Cup contenders.
Fierceness is 3 for 3 at Saratoga and has won Grade 1s at Gulfstream and Santa Anita. Pletcher hopes Fierceness will take to Del Mar as well.
“I think he’ll like a track like Del Mar,” Pletcher said. “He liked Santa Anita, he liked Gulfstream, they’re speed-oriented tracks. I think it would be to his liking.”
◗ Next, the dominant dirt marathoner in the country, worked a half-mile in 50.80 seconds on Tuesday over Turfway Park’s synthetic surface. Trainer Doug Cowans said he was pleased with the work and was scheduled to have a talk this week with owner Michael Forster to discuss whether to point Next to the Classic, the $5 million Turf, or something else.
“He’s the same as he always is, did just enough to get me on a path to figure out what we want to do,” Cowans said. “For me, I don’t know the right answer.”
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