Ocean Knight returns in allowance sprint

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – Ocean Knight, sidelined since a seventh-place finish March 7 in the Tampa Bay Derby, returns to the races Saturday in a second-level allowance race at seven furlongs at Saratoga.

Among those he will face is Havana, the winner of the Grade 1 Champagne in 2013.

Ocean Knight won the first two starts of his career, including the Grade 3 Sam F. Davis, before running an inexplicably poor race in Tampa. He was kept in training and had been under consideration for the Wood Memorial before being sent to the farm for a break.

“We were worried about him,” trainer Kiaran McLaughlin said. “We don’t know that we figured it out, but the time off really helped him. He’s doing great.”

Liam’s Map named for colonel

Liam’s Map, one of many contenders Saturday in the Grade 1 Whitney, is named in honor of a war veteran who now is a colonel at West Point.

Vincent Viola, who owns Liam’s Map with his wife, Teresa, named the horse after Liam Collins, who was one of the first soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Viola, a 1977 graduate of West Point, was at a Hail and Farewell ceremony, a traditional military gathering, when Collins honored Viola by giving him a silk survival map he used when he first touched down in Afghanistan.

Viola, who got emotional telling the story, said he was so moved by the gesture that he told Collins, “I just bought a horse I think is going to be a champion, and I’m going to name him after you.”

Collins now is a colonel and a professor of military science at West Point.