Brown has duo to win eighth First Lady in a row, ninth overall
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The year 2020 turned out pretty weird, didn’t it? A crazy thing happened in the 2020 First Lady Stakes at Keeneland. Chad Brown merely won the race. In the four years since, Brown-trained First Lady runners finished first and second from 2021 to 2023, and last year’s First Lady yielded a Brown trifecta led by Gina Romantica, a two-time First Lady winner and Brown’s eighth in the fall fixture.
Brown has two chances Saturday, Dynamic Pricing and Segesta, to win his eighth First Lady in a row. Neither horse rates as high as Brown’s best winners, but that doesn’t preclude success. The First Lady, a Grade 1 mile worth $800,000 drew an overflow field but lacks true divisional standouts.
Moreover, a main impediment to another Brown win, Special Wan, might not get to run.
Despite having beaten Segesta last out in the Grade 3, $1.3 million Ladies Turf on Aug. 30 at Kentucky Downs, and despite finishing a good third June 8 in the Grade 1 Just a Game, one of North America’s two most important turf miles for fillies and mares, Special Wan, the 7-2 morning-line favorite, was excluded from the First Lady. The system for determining which horses make the field’s main body gives preference to horses with the highest-level wins, Grade 2s, for instance, versus the Grade 3s that Special Wan has landed, even if those races came on dirt or, for instance, took place more than a year ago and were age-restricted.
“It’s a little messed up. You would think a horse of her caliber would get into the race,” trainer Brendan Walsh said. “We’ve been targeting this. This was probably our bigger target even than the race at Kentucky Downs.”
One scratch and Special Wan draws into the race but must start from post 12, a very poor draw. Walsh said that it probably would take at least two scratches to get Special Wan into the gate at Keeneland rather than awaiting the Goldikova at Del Mar.
To be fair, Dynamic Pricing, perhaps Choisya as well, would be shorter win prices than Special Wan. Dynamic Pricing, after all, won the Just a Game, finishing 1 3/4 lengths ahead of Special Wan. A wet Saratoga turf course boosted Dynamic Pricing that day, and Dynamic Pricing could not quite get back to her peak finishing third in the 1 1/8-mile Diana in July. Dynamic Pricing won the listed Perfect Sting on Aug. 30, a performance that shouldn’t be judged by the quality of the race. The filly slalomed through the field with a powerhouse stretch run and was much more superior than her bare margin of victory.
Brown has said he erred running Segesta on May 2 in the Modesty at Churchill, her 2025 debut, after an intended allowance comeback race the month before was rained off grass. Segesta nonetheless has gotten into a solid pattern, and while her Grade 3 Matchmaker win at Monmouth came after a perfect trip, she hit a new top last month at Kentucky Downs.
Choisya returns to the U.S. from trainer Simon Crisford’s yard in England, and if she runs like she did capturing the Grade 1 Jenny Wiley at Keeneland’s spring meeting, she’ll be formidable. The soft course that helped Dynamic Pricing in the Just a Game ruined Choisya’s chances, and she got the wrong trip setting the pace in the Diana, her most recent start.
Simmering, another England shipper, hit a high-water mark finishing third this past May in the 1000 Guineas, but then went off form before a partial last-start rebound in a French Group 3. Great Generation, another overseas shipper, should prove capable of stretching out from longer European sprints to an American mile, but probably won’t prove capable of overcoming post 11.
Ozara, trained in New York by Miguel Clement, exits a career-best showing, a two-length victory in the Grade 2 Ballston Spa. Heredia, Group 1-placed two Octobers ago in England, controlled a slow pace and won the Grade 2 Yellow Ribbon at Santa Anita last out while making her second start after a 15-month break. Nanda Dea, a one-time Argentine star miler, must overcome a layoff approaching eight months.
And everyone, as everybody knows, must overcome Chad Brown in the First Lady Stakes.
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