Gaffalione, staying in Florida, has a good Derby problem

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Jockey Tyler Gaffalione had one tough decision to make after the championship meet ended: whether to keep riding locally or move his tack to New York for the spring.

Now, the Eclipse Award-winning rider may find himself facing another difficult decision in the weeks ahead: which of two potential mounts to ride in the Kentucky Derby.

Gaffalione, who won 62 races during the championship meet to finish third in the standings behind Luis Saez and Paco Lopez, opted to keep his tack in south Florida for now after discussing the matter long and hard with agent Matt Muzikar.

“We agreed this would be the place right now,” said Gaffalione, who is likely to ride first call here for trainers Chad Brown, Todd Pletcher, and Christophe Clement, who all left strings of horses behind for at least the month of April. “Right now, we have more opportunities down here than in New York.”

Gaffalione rode Fast and Accurate to victory for trainer Mike Maker in the Grade 3 Spiral and Patch to a second-place finish for Pletcher in the Louisiana Derby. Both earned enough points to likely qualify for the Derby.

“Both horses are aiming toward the Kentucky Derby,” Gaffalione said. “We’re going to wait and see how it plays. This is what I’ve been dreaming about for as long as I can remember. Just to be in this position now, there’s nothing like it.”

Aside from the Derby, Gaffalione figures to be in and out of town quite a lot in the months ahead, as he was last weekend, when riding Enterprising to victory in the Grade 2 Muniz Memorial at Fair Grounds and Mo Cash to a win in the $100,000 Sophomore Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs.

“We’re going to be shipping around a lot,” Gaffalione said. “We’ll be based here but gone a lot all summer.”

◗ The Rainbow 6 went unsolved for 27 consecutive days at the end of the championship meeting before being given away due to a mandatory payout on closing day, when multiple bettors hit tickets worth $48,881 apiece for all six winners. But it took only one day for the Rainbow 6 to be hit at the spring-summer meeting, with one player correctly solving the wager that returned $35,516 on Wednesday.

◗ Jockeys Nik Juarez, Leonel Reyes, and Jorge Ruiz won two races apiece on Wednesday’s opening-day program. Reyes’s victories aboard Summers Back ($22.20) and Queen Roller ($47.20) came in the sixth and seventh races and were key to the Rainbow 6 going down.

Juarez, who like Gaffalione had a breakthrough winter, finishing in a dead heat with Javier Castellano for fourth in the jockey standings with 58 wins, said he plans to remain here until the opening of the Monmouth Park season.

◗ With nary a single allowance event on Saturday’s 11-race program, the most interesting horse on the card may well be the unraced 3-year-old Old Dubai, who goes in the ninth race, a $42,000 maiden special weight dash at six furlongs. Old Dubai is a Darley homebred by Tapit and out of the Grade 1 winner Dubai Escapade and will have Ruiz in the saddle for trainer Kiaran McLaughlin.