Maxfield, Vitalogy on the way back

NEW ORLEANS – Maxfield, who was scratched lame from the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Stakes after winning the Grade 1 Breeders’ Futurity at Keeneland, has passed all recent veterinary checks and has begun jogging at a farm in Ocala, Fla.

“He looks great,” trainer Brendan Walsh said Saturday morning while in his Fair Grounds barn.

Maxfield could get about one month of farm training, Walsh said, before joining the trainer’s string at Palm Meadows training center in Florida. Walsh said it’s too soon to think about a specific comeback race.

Vitalogy, the Walsh-trained colt who was scratched from the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf on the insistence of Breeders’ Cup veterinary staff, is even further along than Maxfield, and is set to move from an Ocala farm to Palm Meadows about Jan. 1. Vitalogy was third in the Grade 1 Summer Stakes at Woodbine and a strong, troubled second in the Bourbon Stakes at Keeneland earlier this year. Walsh said he’d probably race Vitalogy once in March with the Transylvania Stakes in April at Keeneland as a spring goal.