Heart to Heart, Oscar Performance turn in turf works

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – Trainer Brian Lynch was all smiles after watching his two top turf horses, Heart to Heart and Oscar Performance, work over the grass at the Oklahoma training track on Monday morning.

Lynch said the Grade 1 Fourstardave on Aug. 11 would be next for Heart to Heart, who worked five furlongs inside the dogs in 1:00.81 with Julien Leparoux aboard, a clocking second only to Oscar Performance’s 1:00.66 final time on Monday’s tab. Heart to Heart continues to maintain top form at the age of 7. He’s already posted a pair of Grade 1 wins this season before narrowly missing a third when outfinished a neck by Hunt in the Shoemaker Mile at Santa Anita.

“I thought it was a really solid work and we’ll come back with just an easy half-mile next week,” said Lynch. “In fact, I got the right breezes I needed from both horses this morning heading into their next starts. Julien told me after that, as many times as he’s worked this horse he didn’t think he’s ever worked as good as he did today.”

Another potential Fourstardave starter, Delta Prince, also worked over the Oklahoma turf on Monday, completing five furlongs in 1:03. Delta Prince is coming off a 1 3/4-length victory in Woodbine’s King Edward Stakes in his 2018 debut.

Trainer Jimmy Jerkens said he intends to enter Delta Prince in the Fourstardave.

“If he were to draw some bad post we could wait and go back for the Woodbine Mile, but that’s a ways off,” he said.

The news wasn’t as good for Jerkens’s rising turf star American Guru, who sustained a condylar fracture working here Sunday and was to undergo surgery on Monday. Jerkens said American Guru sustained a condylar fracture to another leg at 2, and that “the odds are probably against him making it back to race again.”