Jessies First Down ready to score for Padgett

Trainer Jimmy Padgett is closing out a strong meet at the Downs at Albuquerque and the barn has not even called on its biggest gun, Jessies First Down.

That will change Sunday, when the two-time world champion runs in the $300,000 Fall Quarter Horse Championship.

The race is being run as a Grade 1 for the first time and is the richest of five stakes on Albuquerque’s closing-day card. The stakes are worth a total of $1 million, with four races for Quarter Horses and the $165,199 New Mexico State Fair Futurity for Thoroughbreds. The 10-race program ends with a 1 13/16-mile marathon, one of the longest Thoroughbred races in North America.

Padgett is winning at a 31 percent clip at Albuquerque, with a 9 for 29 record through Thursday.

Jessies First Down is making his first appearance at the meet in the Fall Championship, a 440-yard race he won in 2017. Jessies First Down last raced June 2, winning the $250,000 Remington Park Invitational Championship by a length and covering 440 yards in a track-record 20.77 seconds. Rodrigo Vallejo was aboard and has the mount again from post 8 on Sunday.

Jessies First Down has won Grade 1 races in both of his starts this year and has earned $1.2 million, all for his breeder and owner, Ted G. Abrams. The horse was voted the American Quarter Horse Association’s world champion in 2016 and 2017.

The winner of the Fall Championship will earn a berth into the Grade 1, $350,000 Championship at Sunland Park on Dec. 30, according to a press release from the Downs at Albuquerque.

The New Mexico State Fair Futurity is a six-furlong race for 2-year-olds bred in New Mexico. The chief players appear to be Roll On Diabolical and No Pasa Nada, both blowout maiden winners in their last start at Albuquerque.