McGee having banner year; nears best win mark

Trainer Paul McGee started racing at Fair Grounds in 2004. One more victory and this will mark his most successful New Orleans winter.

McGee, entering this week’s racing action had eight winners from just 25 runners, equaling his previous Fair Grounds top from 2010-11, when it took 47 runners to hit the total. More recently, McGee had one, two, or three Fair Grounds winners at meets between 2014 and 2023.

Besides the eight winners – produced by eight different horses – McGee has sent out five runners-up and three third-place finishers, doing his best work in higher-level conditioned claimers and allowance competition. McGee credits some of his success to Neil Howard, his assistant trainer the last couple years. The 76-year-old Howard, once the principal trainer for Lane’s End Farm, retired from his own long career in 2023. During the 2002-03 Fair Grounds meet he won the Diplomat Way and New Orleans Handicap with Mineshaft, Horse of the Year in 2003. The next Fair Grounds season, McGee’s first, Howard went 14-6-2-1 in stakes races.

McGee’s meet started strongly when Miles Ahead won the Thanksgiving Classic for the second year in a row. Making his first start since April 5, Miles Ahead beat rising sprint start Montalcino, matching his career-best 104 Beyer Speed Figure. Miles Ahead, an 8-year-old gelding owned by Samantha Siegel’s Jay Em Ess Stable, was meant to run Jan. 25 at Oaklawn in the King Cotton but could not travel after New Orleans’s record-breaking snowfall.

“They closed I-10 down for four days. We couldn’t get out,” McGee said.

Travel should prove easier this week, when Miles Ahead ships to Arkansas for the Whitmore Stakes. And McGee also has welcomed back to his stable the potential stakes horse Lotsandlotsofcandy. Lotsandlotsofcandy, a Jay Em Ess homebred 4-year-old, finished a distant last debuting in April at Keeneland, but bounced back winning a Churchill maiden sprint by seven lengths with a 94 Beyer and an Ellis Park first-level allowance by five with a 90. She hasn’t started since her second win on July 29, but McGee said Lotsandlotsofcandy has breezed sharply for an intended Keeneland allowance comeback next month.

Plenty of things to look forward to in coming weeks for McGee, who can look back with satisfaction at this Fair Grounds season.

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