Mind Your Biscuits has energetic blowout for Dubai Golden Shaheen
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Mind Your Biscuits managed to overcome post 14 and storm to victory a year ago in the Group 1, $2 million Dubai Golden Shaheen. A couple hours later, Arrogate went out and ran one of the most remarkable races in recent memory winning the Dubai World Cup, shoving the Shaheen onto the back burner.
“What he did here last year got overshadowed a little by Arrogate, but he was phenomenal,” said Mind Your Biscuits's trainer, Chad Summers.
What Summers is doing a year later is try to follow the same routine with his horse that led to success. That included a Tuesday breeze, with Mind Your Biscuits blowing out down the Meydan homestretch and going out fairly strongly another furlong around the clubhouse turn. Mind Your Biscuits clearly was into the work, bounding energetically while showing an affinity for the local dirt.
“He’s changed," Summers said. "When he used to breeze, he used to get after it and get after it, but now he does everything real easy, very effortless. I just kind of blew him out a quarter-mile, let him gallop out without doing too much. We’re five days out from the race. We’re doing the same thing we did last year.”
Mind Your Biscuits won his first post-Dubai start last summer, capturing the Belmont Sprint Championship on July 8, but he struggled at Saratoga and finished a dull sixth in the Grade 1 Forego. In the fall, Mind Your Biscuits came back to his better self again, coming from 10th to finish third behind Roy H and Imperial Hint in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint, and second behind Sharp Azteca’s buzzsaw performance in the Cigar Mile.
Following a freshening, Summers brought Mind Your Biscuits back Feb. 9 in a seven-furlong Gulfstream Park allowance race. He lost by a head, but the race served the purpose of moving the horse forward to Dubai, and in the end, Summers decided Mind Your Biscuits had done enough to skip a previously intended start in the Gulfstream Park Sprint and go straight to the Shaheen.
“We look at the race he had as the perfect prep," he said. "The seven-eighths distance really helped us because after here, we’re looking toward the Met Mile. That’s the plan.”