Pirate's Punch produces knockout Beyer

NEW ORLEANS – Pirate’s Punch looked like one of the best older horses stabled at Fair Grounds when he won a second-level allowance race Thursday by 11 ½ lengths.

Under Robby Albarado, who had hit the ground in a spill a race earlier, Pirate’s Punch set a strong half-mile pace of 47.19 in this two-turn dirt race but still never wavered in the homestretch, clocking 1:43.18 for 1 1/16 miles, a fast time by Fair Grounds standards that produced a 102 Beyer Speed Figure, the top number over a mile thus far in 2020.

That’s also a career-best number for Pirate’s Punch, a 4-year-old gelding by Shanghai Bobby out of Catch the Moon, by Malibu Moon.

“I let him roll around the turn,” Albarado said Friday morning. “He was doing it pretty easy.”

Pirate’s Punch made his first three starts in California during a 2018 campaign and was turned over to trainer Grant Forster this summer after winning a $30,000 maiden claimer at Churchill. Pirate’s Punch won a first-level allowance at Indiana Grand and finished third in the Super Derby, after which Forster began racing the gelding without blinkers. Sans headgear, Pirate’s Punch was second by a neck and second by a head in second-level allowance races in Kentucky, the best performances of his career – until Thursday.

“He’d been training so well,” said Forster. “All being well, we’ll point for the Mineshaft,” the Grade 3 dirt-route race here Feb. 15.