Brown sends five for Santa Anita turf stakes

Trainers Chad Brown and Mark Casse are sending seven horses to Santa Anita for graded stakes on turf from Saturday through Monday.

Brown, who has won the Eclipse Award as the nation’s outstanding trainer the last four years, has five scheduled starters – Rockemperor in Saturday’s Grade 2 Charles Whittingham Stakes, a $200,000 race at 1 1/4 miles; and two runners in each of the two Grade 1 races on Monday – the Shoemaker Mile and the Gamely Stakes for fillies and mares at 1 1/8 miles.

Brown runs Raging Bull and Without Parole in a competitive running of the $300,000 Shoemaker. The projected field includes River Boyne, winner of the Grade 1 Frank Kilroe Mile on March 7, and War of Will, winner of the 2019 Preakness Stakes for Casse.

Raging Bull, unraced since a fourth in the Grade 1 Woodbine Mile last September, won the Grade 1 Hollywood Derby at Del Mar in November 2018. Without Parole was 11th of 12 in the Grade 1 Pegasus World Cup Turf Invitational at 1 3/16 miles at Gulfstream Park in January, but has better form at a mile.

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Without Parole won the Group 1 St. James’s Palace Stakes for 3-year-olds at a mile at Royal Ascot in England in 2018 and was a game third in the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Santa Anita last November in his American debut.

In the $300,000 Gamely, Brown will start Beautiful Lover, who was second in the Grade 2 Hillsborough Stakes on March 7 at Tampa Bay Downs, and Etoile, a group stakes winner in France last year who has yet to start in the United States.

Brown said Wednesday that the disrupted race schedule throughout the nation this spring led him to send Etoile and the others to California. Etoile was fourth by three-quarters of a length in the Group 1 French Oaks last June, a race known in that country as the Prix de Diane, when trained by Jean-Claude Rouget.

“Normally, I don’t run that far away from me the first time in the country,” Brown said. “We’ve got to get her going.”

Etoile, 4, has not raced since she finished ninth of 12 at 34-1 in the Group 1 Prix de l’Opera at Longchamp Racecourse in Paris last October.

Casse, who will be inducted into the Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., later this year, also will run March to the Arch in the Shoemaker. March to the Arch won the Sunshine Millions Turf at Gulfstream Park in January.

The Whittingham field is led by United, runner-up in the BC Turf here last November.

There are two sprint stakes at 5 1/2 furlongs on turf this weekend – the Grade 3 Daytona Stakes, a $100,000 race on Saturday, and Monday’s Grade 2 Monrovia Stakes, a $200,000 race for fillies and mares.