Mattingly leads lineup in My Frenchman

Turf or dirt, Mattingly should hit hard Sunday in the $100,000 My Frenchman Stakes.

Restricted to 3-year-olds, the My Frenchman is carded for 5 1/2 furlongs on grass, but rain was already falling Friday morning at Monmouth and was forecast to intensify Friday night and carry into the weekend. With the Haskell card, which includes three turf stakes, less than a week away, it probably would not take a deluge for the race to move to dirt.

Mattingly, a Bucchero colt trained for Ironhorse Stables and Barlow Racing by Joe Orseno, has proven a tri-surface threat. At age 2, he won a maiden and a stakes races racing over Gulfstream’s Tapeta surface, going on to finish a solid second at seven furlongs on dirt in the $200,000 Affirmed, for Florida-sired horses. Sprinting on turf this year, Mattingly was a close fifth, outrun by better horses than were entered in the My Frenchman, in the Palisades at Keeneland. Most recently, he set the pace and held second, beaten a neck, in the Paradise Creek, a six-furlong turf dash at Aqueduct.

Mattingly probably runs best pressing or stalking a target rather than leading, and in Glacial Power – only a contender on turf – he should get one. Apollo Ten was cross-entered in the Quick Call, a Saratoga race in the same division Sunday, but trainer Christophe Clement at press time hadn’t responded to a text asking where the colt was more likely to start.

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