Judy the Beauty will skip spring meet

LEXINGTON, Ky. – Wise Dan won’t be running at the Keeneland spring meet, but that’s been known for some time now. What came as somewhat unexpected and further disappointing news for racing fans is that champion Judy the Beauty won’t make the meet either.

“I just couldn’t get her ready in time,” said Wesley Ward, who owns and trains Judy the Beauty, the Eclipse Award-winning female sprinter of 2014. “It was a fierce winter, and we had to miss too much training with her.”

Ward initially had planned to have Judy the Beauty make her 6-year-old debut in the Grade 1 Madison Stakes, one of five graded stakes on a blockbuster Saturday card at Keeneland. He admitted that his unconventional decision to send the mare to frigid Turfway Park all winter – as opposed to keeping her at his regular base in sunny Florida – did backfire somewhat, but he added that he has “no worries.”

“Getting her back to the Breeders’ Cup is our only real goal with her this year anyway,” he said, referring to a title defense in the BC Filly and Mare Sprint at Keeneland in late October.

Wise Dan, the 2012 and 2013 Horse of the Year in North America, has been tack-walking in the Rice Road barn of Charlie LoPresti amid optimism that he will return to training soon. The 8-year-old gelding incurred a compression fracture in his right foreleg last October, forcing him to miss not only the Breeders’ Cup but his greatly hyped annual return from winter vacation at the Keeneland spring meet.

Meanwhile, Ward said he is considering the Grade 1 Humana Distaff on the May 2 Kentucky Derby undercard as the return spot for Judy the Beauty, an Ontario-bred who has been first or second in 16 of 18 starts and has earned more than $1.6 million. The mare breezed an easy half-mile here Tuesday in 53 seconds on the grass with the “dogs” far out onto the course, marking her second work of the winter.

“I had Mike Smith work her the morning of the Spiral [on March 21] at Turfway, and he liked what she did,” said Ward. “I’ll run her Derby Day if she tells me she just can’t stand herself anymore. Obviously, we’ll let her training speak for itself.”

As usual, Ward is loaded for bear in regard to race-ready “babies,” as they call them around here. Since the spring meet of 2007, he has won a remarkable 39 races at Keeneland with 2-year-olds.

“I’ve got two for every 2-year-old race in the book,” he said.

Six races at the Headley Course distance of 4 1/2 furlongs are in the Keeneland condition book for the 15-day meet – three for each gender. The first, for fillies, is scheduled for Wednesday.

Ward, the leading trainer at the 2012 spring and fall meets at Keeneland, has plenty of other irons in the fire, including ambitious plans for a number of his top horses, including a trip to Royal Ascot in June with Luck of the Kitten, the likely favorite in the featured Transylvania Stakes on the Friday opener at Keeneland.

“We’ll probably want to take some 2-year-olds over there, too,” he said. “But we’ll have to see which of them emerge as our best. I like quite a few of them.”