Love and Marriage brings consistency to Sunday turf feature
For a field with only six turf entrants, plus one main-track-only runner, Sunday’s featured fourth race at Gulfstream is a puzzler. Most of the competitors in the third-level, $45,000 allowance seem to have one fault or another.
Three fillies – Ticking Katie, Mississippi Delta, and Osaila – have shaky recent form, coming off rear-half finishes in stakes and not having raced since last year. Another pair, Love and Marriage and Ol’ Fashion Gal, won their last starts but also are making their first starts of the year.
Pink Poppy is the only turf entrant to have raced in 2016, though she is returning from a short layoff. She finished third Jan. 16 in the Sunshine Millions Filly and Mare Turf, a race she won in 2015.
The lone filly in the race without stakes experience is Love and Marriage, though she brings consistency and promise to the table. Since a fourth-place finish in her debut, she has recorded top-three finishes in four of five races, including three victories. Last out, she won a one-mile allowance Nov. 15 at Aqueduct, and she’ll be going half a furlong shorter in this 7 1/2-furlong race, carded as race 4.
Leading jockey Javier Castellano rides for owner Justice Family Racing and Chad Brown, who, as usual, is the top-earning turf trainer in North America this year.
A daughter of Arch, Love and Marriage is related to a couple of stakes winners, most notably Grade 2 Highlander winner Go Blue Or Go Home.
Key Contenders
Ticking Katie, by Baltic King
Last 3 Beyers: 86-83-90
◗ Imported from Britain, she won her first start in the U.S. last year over yielding ground in an allowance at Belmont before being outrun when fourth in the De La Rose Stakes at Saratoga on Aug. 8 and when eighth in the Grade 2 Canadian at Woodbine on Sept. 13.
Love and Marriage, by Arch
Last 2 Beyers: 88-85-88
◗ After a flat effort when fifth at Belmont on Oct. 22, she was equipped with blinkers for the first time Nov. 15 and responded with a neck victory.
Pink Poppy, by Tiznow
Last 3 Beyers: 90-51-90
◗ Ran into traffic problems when third in the Sunshine Millions Filly and Mare Turf, getting steadied in midrace and having to await running room coming into the lane.
Osaila, by Tiznow
Last 2 Beyers: 36-90
◗ Failed to challenge in a pair of stakes races in the U.S. last year but won a Group 3 at Newmarket last April and ran third behind Lady Eli in the Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf as a 2-year-old in the fall of 2014.