Colebrook reveling in afterglow of Breeders' Futurity win

LEXINGTON, Ky. – Plenty of folks around Keeneland have known Ben Colebrook since he was a kid, so you might say his first Grade 1 win as a trainer coming at his home track was a pretty big deal.

“I just got done responding to all my messages,” a smiling Colebrook said Sunday afternoon in the aftermath of the stunning 70-1 upset by Knicks Go in the Grade 1 Breeders’ Futurity here Saturday. “It’s still kind of sinking in. It was all pretty surreal.”

Knicks Go won by 5 1/2 lengths in wire-to-wire fashion, putting an abrupt stop to what Colebrook suspected might be an agonizing fall meet. Some 24 hours earlier, his stable star Limousine Liberal encountered an absolutely brutal trip when finishing a close third in the Grade 2 Phoenix.

“It was a bad day Friday and I was wondering how the meet was going to go,” said Colebrook, 40. “I thought [Knicks Go] could run a decent race, but I never thought he’d blow it wide open the way he did.”

While his father, John, managed several Thoroughbred farms in the Blue Grass region, Colebrook attended school in Lexington and nearby Versailles before moving to Shelby County, Ky., during his high school years. He returned to Lexington in his late teens and has worked on local farms and the racetrack since then, moving away only when he served as an assistant for about four years to Christophe Clement. He went out on his own late in 2012 and has seen his numbers rise steadily. He won 45 races in both 2016 and 2017. He already has surpassed his career-high stable earnings for a year with more than $2.3 million in 2018.

The Breeders’ Futurity also was the first Grade 1 win for jockey Albin Jimenez and just his second in a graded event, following Lady Fog Horn in the 2016 Falls City at Churchill Downs.