Calhoun hopes Mr. Money can start hot streak for stable
Trainer Bret Calhoun has won as many as 50 races during a Fair Grounds racing season. Right now, even a couple would feel pretty good.
Calhoun, through racing of Jan. 10 at Fair Grounds, had a meet record of 52-3-7-4, which is not at all like his stable’s typical production level. “Due” may be just an empty concept, but really, Calhoun is due for a Fair Grounds hot streak.
“It’s been pretty rough, a slow meet for a number of reasons,” Calhoun said by phone Thursday. “I think I’ve got a handful of nice young prospects coming to hand and the weekend of the 19th would be a good time to get things rolling.”
Road to the Derby Kickoff Day is Jan. 19 at Fair Grounds, and Calhoun has one of the likely favorites, Mr. Money, for the Grade 3, $200,000 Lecomte Stakes. Calhoun also plans to run Cowgirls Like Us, winner of the Trapeze Stakes at Remington Park last out, in the $150,000 Silverbulletday on the same Fair Grounds card.
Mr. Money’s last start came under bright lights, a fourth-place finish in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. Racing just behind the leaders, Mr. Money loomed on the far turn as though he meant to do something serious. His run flattened out before the eighth pole, but he still stayed on encouragingly to finish fourth of 13.
“He ran well. At the three-eighths pole, he got us pretty excited,” Calhoun said.
The BC Juvenile was Mr. Money’s first try against other winners. He had graduated at third asking Sept. 28 at Churchill when Calhoun stretched him out to a route for the first time.
“I thought he got a lot of seasoning his first couple races, got a couple difficult trips, and he might have broke his maiden earlier with a better trip,” Calhoun said. “Looking at the [Juvenile] field, I thought there was one standout and that the rest of us were pretty similar, so we thought we’d give him a shot.”
The standout, Game Winner, won by two lengths, but on established form there’s no horse of close to comparable quality in the Lecomte. Mr. Money, owned by Allied Racing Stable, raced a little too keenly down the backstretch of his two route races and has room to improve in that area, and Calhoun said the colt, by Goldencents and out of the Tiznow mare Plenty O’Toole, “has trained phenomenally” since getting back to regular exercise following a short freshening after arriving at Fair Grounds.
As for Cowgirls Like Us, she got in six starts as a 2-year-old, but from her trainer’s perspective just now should be starting to come into her own. Cowgirls Like Us, a Douglas Scharbauer homebred by My Golden Song out of Nothinbettertodo, debuted in late May in a 4 1/2-furlong sprint at Lone Star but wasn’t really a precocious type.
“She’s a filly that was a bigger, good-looking scopier filly early on. She wasn’t really made to do what we asked her to do that early, and it took her a few races to get it together. We thought longer would be better for her,” Calhoun said.
Cowgirls Like Us won the off-the-turf Senorita Stakes in her two-turn debut and was comfortably best beating seven rivals Dec. 16 in the $100,000 Trapeze, another route. She appears to be coming into her 2019 campaign pointed in the right direction, and her trainer hopes that might generally be the case for his slumbering New Orleans stable.
