Moonlight a threat as Just a Touch again tries for elusive first stakes win

Let’s try this again.

Four weeks ago, Just a Touch was supposed to be at Fair Grounds, overwhelmingly favored to win his first stakes race in the Tenacious. Instead, trainer Brad Cox kept the horse home at Payson Park in Florida. Just a Touch’s last race came in July, and when Cox entered him in the Tenacious, Just a Touch had logged only five works, none farther than a half-mile.

“They enter a week out down there, and I thought, let me just put him in the race,” Cox said. “He never made the trip. I just didn’t think he was quite ready.”

Just a Touch has since logged three five-furlong drills, the last two fast by deep-surface Payson standards.

“If he’s not ready now, he never will be,” Cox said.

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Impressive workouts have come easy for Just a Touch, as have maiden and allowance competition. In just his second start, he finished second to the good colt Deterministic in the Gotham Stakes, and in his third race he gave eventual 3-year-old champion Sierra Leone a fight in the Blue Grass. Just a Touch has since started in four stakes. In very tough, he finished third in the Grade 1 Metropolitan Handicap, but Just a Touch took defeats at 7-10 in the Iowa Derby and at 1-10 in the Monmouth Cup, his most recent outing.

Just a Touch meets seven rivals and will have all of them inside him when the field is fully loaded into the starting gate for the 1 1/16-mile Louisiana, a Grade 3 worth $175,000. Florent Geroux rode the 5-year-old in all nine of his starts, but he gives way to Irad Ortiz Jr., who in the autumn emerged as Cox’s go-to jockey.

Ortiz has a mount with ample early speed to get into decent position before the first turn, though three other horses – Willy D’s, Accelerize, and Tarantino – will also want to go forward.

Accelerize makes just his fourth career start, trying two turns and stakes competition for the first time after capturing a first-level allowance over a one-turn mile last month at Gulfstream Park. While Accelerize has ability, he was no match for the unbeaten 5-year-old Life and Times in a Jan. 10 team workout at trainer Todd Pletcher’s winter base, Palm Beach Downs.

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Willy D’s held a first-call lead in four of his last five starts, including his lone stakes score in the Schaefer Memorial at Horseshoe Indianapolis, where he led all the way over a strongly inside speed-biased track. Tarantino, in from Santa Anita for trainer Peter Eurton, who runs a Fair Grounds string, figures to use his speed to sit just behind the leaders.

Sir Greylind closed from last of six to finish second in the fast-paced Tenacious, but Moonlight provides a more appealing off-pace option.

Originally trained by Pletcher, Moonlight joined trainer Chris Block’s barn in late summer 2024. His first four starts for Block were nothing special, but this past March he won an off-turf Fair Grounds allowance by almost 10 lengths with what was then a career-best 92 Beyer. Moonlight has since captured three of five starts, emerging as a legitimate stakes horse capable of running a triple-digit Beyer.

“People have asked me what’s changed in him. I tell them he’s just matured, he’s done it on his own,” Block said.

Moonlight must answer two questions. Can he run as well going 1 1/16 miles around two turns as he has in one-turn miles? And can he produce a peak race at a track other than Churchill Downs?

“I think Saturday he’ll run well, especially if he handles Fair Grounds like he does Churchill,” Block said. “But Brad’s horse looks like he’s training like a monster.”

Just a Touch nearly always trains like a monster. Yet he’ll be trying again, heavily favored in the Louisiana, to win his first stakes.

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