Cap It Daddy on the rise for Madrigal's two-horse stable

Among the trainers with horses entered in Saturday’s seventh race at Emerald Downs are a Washington Racing Hall of Famer in the twilight of his career (Howard Belvoir), the track’s all-time winningest trainer (Tom Wenzel), and a perennial West Coast stalwart whose horses finished one-two in Sunday’s $50,000 Budweiser Stakes (Blaine Wright).

Then there’s Elodio Madrigal.

In a nine-year training career spent primarily at Pacific Northwest tracks, Madrigal has 30 wins from 288 starts for earnings of $288,141, according to Equibase. He used to ship strings to Oregon and Arizona, but nowadays he sticks to Emerald, explaining that “it cost me too much money” to hit the road.

There are just two horses in Madrigal’s stable. One of them, Hot Betty, is a low-level claimer who made her season debut June 14 off a 288-day layoff, finishing fourth in a six-furlong sprint with a 27 Beyer Speed Figure. Madrigal’s other horse is the 4-year-old Cap It Daddy, came back from a 265-day layoff on May 23 to finish second in a six-furlong starter allowance by three-quarters of a length to one of the track’s top older horses, the stakes winner Chuckanut Bay. Cap It Daddy earned a career-best 82 Beyer.

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Madrigal may have but two horses in his stable, but it only takes one to win a race – and Cap It Daddy is as live as they come in Saturday’s six-furlong sprint, which has a $25,000 purse and a $40,000 claiming option. Cap It Daddy is one of only two horses not in for the tag in the seven-horse field.

Cap It Daddy has steadily improved his speed figures in each of his seven career starts, from which he’s posted a record of 3-2-1. He won’t go off favored while facing Chuckanut Bay again, but, along with fellow 4-year-old Candy Caballo, Cap It Daddy has an excellent chance to move forward off his last effort.

“I need to run him to the top horses,” said Madrigal of Cap It Daddy, whose consecutive wins to close out 2025 were wire-to-wire efforts. “He could maybe win an allowance to run in the stakes, but I need to win an allowance first. This is my dream, to have an allowance horse. When he’s in front, he’s a monster.”

Stakes-placed Candy Caballo, who won at this level with a career-best 81 Beyer on June 6, also would like to be in front, as would Coastal Jazz, another stakes winner. In other words, there should be ample pace in this race – which could set things up perfectly for the versatile 7-year-old Executive Chef, a stakes winner at 3 who was scratched out of the Budweiser Stakes to instead run in this slightly softer spot.

Once it became evident that this race would fill, trainer Blaine Wright scratched Executive Chef out of the Budweiser to give his owners, John and Janine Maryanski and Gail and Gerald Schneider, a chance to win two different races. Their other horse, Si That Tiger, finished second in the Budweiser after a slightly slow start, but Executive Chef has an excellent shot of salvaging his connections’ scratch-and-separate strategy on Saturday.

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