Juveniles chase nice payday in two Virginia-restricted stakes
If you prefer “class,” maybe you like Simply Super in the $150,000 Hickory Tree Stakes on Tuesday at Colonial Downs. If you prefer speed, you’re sure to favor Heldish.
Colonial’s morning-line maker evidently takes a class-based approach, making Simply Super the 9-5 morning line favorite. But Heldish, based on his lone start, is easily the fastest Hickory Tree entrant. He won with plenty to spare first time out at Laurel Park as an odds-on favorite and is the likely chalk again Tuesday in the Hickory Tree.
Handicapping angles aside, the Hickory Tree and the $150,000 Keswick, its sister race, are extremely lucrative opportunities for 2-year-olds who have not displayed six-figure stakes talent. Both races are restricted to Virginia-bred, -sired, or -registered horses and carded at five furlongs on dirt. The Hickory Tree goes as race 5, the Keswick as race 7, and Heldish is the only horse in either race with a Beyer Speed Figure higher than 50.
Heldish, by Great Notion, debuted in a five-furlong dirt race open to maiden special weight entrants bred in Maryland or $45,000 claimers, and he made short work of six rivals. Going straight to the lead under Sheldon Russell, who rides him back Tuesday, Heldish won by 2 1/4 lengths under a hand ride, clocking 58.77, a raw time that earned him a 62 Beyer.
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The race’s fourth-place finisher, Evenly Divided, returned to win a maiden special weight turf sprint at Colonial. Box N Ben, second to Heldish, hasn’t run back and had more than seven lengths on the third-place finisher that afternoon.
Simply Super, trained by Mike Maker, won his career debut, a 4 1/2-furlong sprint in April at Keeneland, and subsequently tried a pair of rich stakes races at Churchill Downs – tried and failed. Simply Super does cut back from six furlongs to five and showed speed before fading to a distant fourth last out in the Bashford Manor, but his best Beyer, 49, comes up well short of Heldish’s.
There’s even less proven quality in the Keswick, where Titoschangedmyluck would offer value in the unlikely event she goes postward anywhere near her 12-1 morning line. Titoschangedmyluck finished second to an odds-on favorite making her career debut in an open maiden special weight race at Delaware Park, and in her second start she lost her jockey going around the Delaware far turn. Her debut performance puts her squarely in the mix with opponents such as Cocktail Dreaming, a last-out Laurel maiden special weight winner, and Naval Empire, a comfortable debut winner of a Virginia-restricted maiden race at Colonial.