Hope Road best of a very tough cast in the Winning Colors
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First time back from a four-month layoff and Mink’s Palace won her first stakes race, the $200,000 Roxelana on April 25 at Churchill Downs, a strong comeback performance from this 4-year-old filly and something to build on into the summer. She’ll get a chance to do so Monday in the Grade 3, $250,000 Winning Colors.
But wait a second. Mink’s Palace on Monday runs smack into a horse markedly better than anything she beat in the Roxelana. Two Sharp, a $925,000 auction buy trained for Rigney Racing by Phil Bauer, debuted last June, hit a 98 Beyer Speed Figure winning at Saratoga in her second start, went 5-3-2-0 for the season, and when last seen on Nov. 25 was easily winning the Chilukki Stakes over the Churchill main track.
Two Sharp should hit hard in the Winning Colors – but hold on. Other than in her troubled debut, Two Sharp has lost to a grand total of one horse. That’s Winning Colors starter Brightwork, a Grade 1 winner at age 2 who, returning from a layoff of nearly 10 months, nipped Two Sharp in the Prioress last summer at Saratoga. Brightwork went on to finish a tame third in the Thoroughbred Club of America in October, and while she hasn’t been seen since, Brightwork has gone 3 for 3 in the first races of her form cycles.
Turns out Mink’s Palace might be up against it in the Winning Colors. So might Two Sharp and Brightwork.
Bob Baffert not only returned to the Kentucky Derby this year for the first time since 2021, he left a small string at Churchill after Derby week. Among them: Hope Road, who will take no end of beating in the six-furlong Winning Colors.
Hope Road, the mount of Florent Geroux, drew post 7 among nine entered in the Winning Colors. Before the start she will look right and see Mink’s Palace and Two Sharp, look left and spy Brightwork drawn down on the rail, but it’s a horse she won’t see in the gate that ought to make Hope Road’s heart swell.
Hope Road, moved into the Baffert barn for her 2024 campaign, won four straight, including a pair of Grade 3s. But in her last three outings – a fourth in the Grade 1 La Brea, seconds in the Grade 2 Santa Monica and the Grade 1 Derby City Distaff at Churchill – she had the distinct misfortune of running into the 4-year-old filly Kopion. Based on her string of Beyer Speed Figures, Kopion has been the fastest horse in North America the last few months. She’s definitely the best female sprinter in the land, perhaps the best sprinter period. Hope Road touched 104 and 102 on the Beyer scale her last two starts and didn’t come close to Kopion.
Hope Road has raced seven furlongs or one mile her last five starts, but she’s 2 for 2, both dominating wins, in her starts for Baffert at the Winning Colors’s six-furlong trip. She carries the same 118 pounds as the others in the race and has gotten in two local workouts since her Derby City Distaff.
Two Sharp’s the one with a realistic shot at a minor upset if everyone comes close to their baseline. She, like Hope Road, might in the end prefer at least another half-furlong, but in the Chilukki Bauer raced Two Sharp for the first time in blinkers, and she absolutely aired.
Bauer took Two Sharp to Fair Grounds late last year with thoughts of making the La Brea in December, but that didn’t work out, and Two Sharp instead got a break. She, and the others, did not catch a break in the Winning Colors, headed by a very fast filly named Hope Road.
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