Joseph seeks first Churchill stakes win with favored R Disaster
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The trainer Saffie Joseph Jr. won a career-best 35 stakes races during 2024, doubling his 2023 total. He has 33 stakes wins this year and the better part of two months to find three more and surpass last year’s mark. A plurality of bettors will guess Joseph gets No. 34 when he runs R Disaster as the 9-5 morning-line favorite in the $300,000 Dream Supreme Stakes.
Joseph began starting horses at Churchill in 2020 and has accumulated 23 winners. He’s 2 for 2 at this meet and has won with three of his last four Churchill runners.
What Joseph never has done is win a Churchill stakes. His record in those races coming into the Dream Supreme, a six-furlong dirt sprint, stands at 35-0-2-8.
Add that to the fact that R Disaster stands to regress after a career-best effort on Sept. 27, a 3 1/2-length win in the Grade 2 Gallant Bloom at Aqueduct, and that the front-running filly encounters a major pace rival in Hillerito. Sure, it’s possible R Disaster, a 4-year-old with just 12 starts, has merely established a new, higher baseline, and that she will sit a perfectly fine pressing trip, but would you want to bet on that? The morning line lists her at 9-5 and she could go off shorter.
Racing over a sloppy Saratoga track, Halina’s Forte beat R Disaster in the Honorable Miss at Saratoga this summer. Halina’s Forte has since turned in two decidedly sub-par showings, but she might merely have bounced after the Honorable Miss when ninth in the Grade 1 Ballerina. In October, Halina’s Forte ran well below her best again in the Thoroughbred Club of America Stakes at Keeneland, but she also performed poorly in her only other Keeneland start and might not suit that track as well as Churchill, where she’s 6-3-1-0.
Mink’s Palace, a generous 8-1 on the morning line, also thrives at Churchill, where she has gone 9-4-2-1. A stalking and closing sprinter, she could get a good setup and enters fresh. She last raced Sept. 13, when Positano Sunset, a Grade 1 winner this past spring, pipped her at the post going 6 1/2 furlongs in the Open Mind.
Tyler Gaffalione on Hillerito – one of two in the race, along with Marmalade Sky, for owner-trainer David Jacobson – probably has little choice but to gun from the lead while drawn inside R Disaster. While she’s 5, Hillerito has made only seven starts and just three for Jacobson. She set the pace and checked in second last month at Keeneland, but that 6 1/2-furlong contest stretched her. A return to six furlongs and Churchill, where Hillerito won sharply in September, boosts her chances.
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