Emmanuel gets tough draw as favorite in Carey
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While some bemoan the too-great number of tracks racing simultaneously in various regions, including the Midwest, trainer Mike Maker could use a few more venues to accommodate his legion of older-male turf horses.
Maker has middle-distance turfers, long-distance turfers, graded stakes grass runners, and older horses shuttling between high claimers and listed stakes. And, unsurprisingly, he has two entrants for the $150,000 Carey Memorial, featured race Sunday at Hawthorne and one of the most important races remaining on the skeletal Chicago circuit.
The Carey is carded for one mile on Hawthorne’s grass course and drew 11 entrants, including the Maker-trained pair of Paros and Emmanuel, the latter the likely favorite. Named to ride Emmanuel for the first time is Hawthorne native son Emmanuel Esquivel, who goes by Manny and all but grew up on the Hawthorne backstretch, launching his jockey career at the track.
Sunday, Esquivel is tasked with working out a trip for Emmanuel from post 10, a tough draw with a relatively short run to the first turn in the Carey. While Maker gets many of these older turf horses through the claim box, he signed a $500,000 ticket for Emmanuel when the horse was sent to auction in July 2024. Results have been modest for owners Case Chambers, Paradise Farms Corp., and David Staudacher. Emmauel in his nine starts since the sale has three seventh-place finishes, a fifth, three fourths, and, mercifully, a win Aug. 15 in the $150,000 Pennsylvania Governor’s Cup. Last out, racing over a Kentucky Downs surface he doesn’t seem to love, Emmanuel broke from another wide post, 12, pressed the pace, and retreated in a $500,000 handicap won by his stablemate, Chasing the Crown. No horse of that quality populates the Carey field, and Esquivel, if all the on-paper speed shows, should find a way into a midpack stalking spot without losing too much ground.
Paros stands at 10-1 on the morning line, and while he’s probably not that high when the gates open, he’s the better bet between Maker’s two. Paros, no speed horse, somehow wound up setting a fast pace while making his Kentucky Downs debut in the restricted Tapit Stakes on Aug. 28, the wrong trip on the wrong course. That marked his first start in five months, and fading form at the end of his previous cycle to some extent obscures the strong work Paros did during late summer and autumn 2024.
Illinois-breds Another Mystery and Katie M’lady ran one-two in the 2024 Carey, a softer spot than this renewal, and one-way speed horse Katie M’lady faces two serious front-end foes in Golden Bandit and Frosty View. Nine-year-old Another Mystery probably isn’t quite up to taking advantage of a favorable race flow. One of the two Makers probably is.
◗ Even as a significantly diminished version of her younger self, the 6-year-old mare Oeuvre will be favored to defeat five Illinois-bred rivals in the $75,000 Jean Elizabeth Stakes.
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