Fair Grounds: Warm Breeze must travel for next stakes

Warm Breeze clearly has found her calling as a dirt sprinter, and she jumped up from a first-level allowance victory on Dec. 28 to capture the $59,000 Happy Ticket, her stakes debut, on Saturday at Fair Grounds. Pacesetting Warm Breeze only held on to beat Same Cross by a nose in the six-furlong race, but the pair had more than nine lengths on third-place Ire, and Warm Breeze’s raw time of 1:10.33 produced a career-best and graded-stakes-class 97 Beyer Speed Figure.

Trainer Grant Forster said Warm Breeze, who has made only four dirt-sprint starts in her nine-race career, appeared to have come out of the Happy Ticket in good condition. There are no suitable stakes races for Warm Breeze during the remainder of the Fair Grounds meet, and Forster said the 4-year-old Street Sense filly would be considered for the March 22 Inside Information at Gulfstream Park.

Marchman shortens to sprint

Marchman’s two starts at the ongoing meet were polar opposites: He was a good-looking front-end winner of the Woodchopper Stakes on Nov. 30, and a bad-looking 10th-place finisher Dec. 21 in the Buddy Diliberto Memorial. Both those races were grass routes, and trainer Bret Calhoun is trying something shorter with Marchman in the featured fifth race on Thursday at Fair Grounds, a 5 1/2-furlong turf sprint open to third-level allowance horses, horses who haven’t won a race since Aug. 6, 2013, and $62,500 claimers.

With thunderstorms virtually a certainty Tuesday night in New Orleans, Thursday’s featured fifth could easily wind up being contested on dirt, but that shouldn’t matter to Marchman. His most recent dirt start produced a fine pacesetting second-place finish last fall in the Bet on Sunshine Stakes at Churchill.

If the race is moved to dirt, main-track-only entrant Joe Hollywood and Bet Seattle appear to be Marchman’s primary rivals. On turf, Pure Tactics and Animal Style are likely major players.