Girls Know Best faces boys in stakes prep

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Eddie Kenneally has priorities for Girls Know Best. He needs a prep race for the mare, who has gone unraced for more than eight months, and if it means running her against males, well, that’s what the trainer will do.

Kenneally is pointing Girls Know Best to the Grade 3 Franklin County Stakes on Oct. 11 at Keeneland and is using the Sunday feature as a bridge to that race.

“Unfortunately, there was no filly-mare race that suits our timing,” Kenneally said. “We need a race under her belt before we run next month.

“Even against the boys, this looks like a good place to start back.”

Girls Know Best, with Corey Lanerie riding, will break from post 3 in the race-4 feature Sunday at Churchill Downs, a $105,000 allowance with hybrid conditions that include an optional $150,000 claiming tag. Surely she’ll be prominent from the start of the five-furlong turf race, given her natural speed and the fact she’ll be fresh from the layoff. She has been “doing unbelievably well” in her recent training at Keeneland, Kenneally said.

A winner in 11 of 21 starts, Girls Know Best won a turf-sprint stakes at Gulfstream Park in late December and had been intended to run next on the Pegasus World Cup undercard in the Ladies Turf Sprint, a race she won in 2018. But a “minor splint issue,” as Kenneally described it, forced the 5-year-old Caleb’s Posse mare to the sidelines, and she resurfaces Sunday with eight breezes since mid-July, including a bullet three-furlong drill in 34.80 seconds last weekend.

If Girls Know Best isn’t quite ready, the most likely upsetter is Satellite Storm, a speedy British Columbia-bred gelding who brings back-to-back 95 Beyer Speed Figures and a three-race win streak in from Canterbury Park for Valorie Lund.

The rest of the opposition includes Recount, winner of a turf-sprint allowance here in the spring for trainer Jimmy DiVito, and Jazzy Times, whose two-back effort at Ellis Park resulted in a mid-90s Beyer Speed Figure. Both of those geldings are entered for the $150,000 claiming option.

In all, 10 are entered in the Sunday feature, but three of those are designated for the main track only and most likely will scratch. A drought approaching three weeks’ time continues to envelop this region, with no rain in the forecast.

The feature is the first of two allowances on a 10-race card that starts at 12:45 p.m. Eastern. It’s outside of the Single 6 sequence, which spans races 5-10 and includes the other allowance – a $99,000 first-level allowance (race 9) for fillies and mares at a mile on the main track.

After Sunday, Churchill goes dark for three days before a four-day week starts Thursday.