Brown primed to win sixth straight Plenty of Grace

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Technical Analysis looks like a short-priced favorite to give trainer Chad Brown his sixth consecutive victory in the $100,000 Plenty of Grace Stakes, a one-mile turf race for fillies and mares to be run Saturday at Aqueduct.

Brown didn’t run a horse in the inaugural Plenty of Grace in 2015 and the 2020 running was canceled due to the pandemic, but Brown has won it each year it has been run since 2016. The Plenty of Grace has proven to be a good starting point to the year for the likes Uni and Regal Glory who went on to win Grade 1 stakes the year they won the Plenty of Grace.

Technical Analysis, an Irish-bred daughter of Kingman, won both the Grade 3 Lake George and Grade 2 Lake Placid at Saratoga last summer. She ended her 3-year-old campaign with a second-place finish to stablemate Shantisara in the Grade 1 Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup at Keeneland. Shantisara is entered in Saturday’s Grade 1 Jenny Wiley at Keeneland.

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Technical Analysis has been successful from on or just off the pace and figures to be a forward factor from the outside post in what would be a five-horse field on turf. Dylan Davis rides.

“She’s a fine racehorse with a really high cruising speed,” Brown said. “This is a chance to get her settled in New York, where she’s trained well and run well in the past.”

Christophe Clement won the inaugural Plenty of Grace with Stellar Path in 2015. Saturday, he sends out Plum Ali for her 4-year-old debut. Plum Ali ran well without winning in several spots last year before ending her campaign with a front-running victory in the Winter Memories over this same Aqueduct turf course on Nov. 14.

Clement said while he’s been training Plum Ali in behind horses, he’ll leave riding tactics up to jockey Manny Franco.

“Being a short field, wherever Manny feels comfortable,” Clement said.

Flower Point and Giacosa finished one-two in last November’s Forever Together Stakes going 1 1/16 miles over the Aqueduct turf course. Both are making their seasonal debuts in this spot.

Flower Point seemed to improve when stretched out in distance, including when she was a troubled third in the one-mile Grade 3 Noble Damsel last year.

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“They were sprinting her in California, and her races here looked like she would probably go [long] and obviously she did at Aqueduct,” said Shug McGaughey, the trainer of Flower Point. “That’s one of the reasons why I pointed her for this is because she ran well over that course.”

Giacosa won the Yaddo Stakes for New York-breds last August at Saratoga for trainer Jimmy Bond.

Alms, trained by Mike Stidham, began her career with four consecutive wins, including stakes wins in the Grade 3 Matron at Belmont and Grade 3 Jimmy Durante at Del Mar. She is 0 for 7 since but did finish second behind Regal Glory in the Pegasus World Cup Filly and Mare Turf in January. Most recently, she finished sixth in the Garde 3 Honey Fox at Gulfstream.

With a short field, the Plenty of Grace was carded as the fourth race on a 10-race card that begins at 1:20 p.m.