Dirt Road Red gets more ground on twilight card
Twilight racing kicks off Friday at Emerald Downs with a seasoned, well-matched field of older horses going a mile in a $15,000 claiming race.
The most experienced of these routers is the 8-year-old gelding Dirt Road Red. With 14 wins in 59 career starts, he went winless in three races as a 2-year-old at Emerald before running on the Southwest and Northern California circuits for the next four years, achieving sporadic success.
But Justin Evans saw something in Dirt Road Red in New Mexico in 2023 that compelled the owner/trainer to purchase him and ship him back up to Emerald. This time around, he finished second by a nose before reeling off five straight wins at distances between six furlongs and a mile and 70 yards, with Beyer Speed Figures all in the 70s.
Local trainer Candi Cryderman and owner John Parker claimed Dirt Road Red out of the last of those five wins in 2023 for $25,000. It took Cryderman a few races to realize that, at this stage of his career, Dirt Road Red was best as a router, and he closed the 2024 Emerald meet by winning 3 of 5 races, with four of those tries coming at a mile or longer.
After an eight-month freshening, Cryderman entered Dirt Road Red in a pair of May sprints, where he finished a respectable second by a neck and third by a length. In race 5 on Saturday, he’ll stretch back out to a mile, which is how he likes it.
“I definitely think this is more his distance,” said Cryderman, who brings Dirt Road Red back less than two weeks after his last race. “He likes two turns better than one, but it’s a new world up here now. We have a lot more competition, and these older horses coming back, they have wear and tear on them. It’s gonna take a minute to figure out where they fit.”
While Dirt Road Red has raced competitively on short rest several times during his long career, Cryderman said she’d prefer to give him a little more time between races. She thinks things will wind up working in her horse’s favor, what with the northward migration of stables from the shuttered Northern California circuit giving Emerald its fullest fields in years.
“These races are filling. I think what you’ll see, in my opinion, is the racing secretary will start making the $15,000 route every three weeks,” she predicted. “It depends on the right conditions at the right time. In the right race, he can wire it. I don’t think he’ll do it here, though.”
Cryderman remarked that she could make an argument for any of the race’s seven entrants, including Fifty Cinco, a Northern California refugee who, in his first Emerald start on May 11, finished second by a nose in a six-furlong sprint.
“That Tim McCanna horse barely got beat by Rollin Dice going short and, obviously, he can route,” Cryderman said of Fifty Cinco, who’s 7-3-0-2 at a mile in his career. “This is really a tough race.”
Post time for the first of seven races Friday will be 7 p.m. Pacific.
:: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.