Princess La Quinta surges to Arlington Matron triumph

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Illinois – Jim Gulick buys auction horses out of the bargain bin, and at the Keeneland sale of November 2014 he bought six and hauled them himself back to his Central Florida farm. Arriving in the middle of the night, he backed his trailer up to a gate, let the half-dozen horses out into a dark field, and when he returned early in the morning to get them settled in, five horses were standing inside the fence.

Outside it, with a gaping wound on a hind leg, was the Quality Road filly who would be named Princess La Quinta. A few months later, he saw the same horse holding her head in a funny way out in the field. Gulick’s farm manager went to check and discovered one of her eyes popped out of its socket. Princess La Quinta had cost $6,500 at auction; the eye injury cost $7,000 to repair.

“The injury-prone ones, those are the ones you want. If you have a horse get loose, run 90 miles, and come back without a scratch, get rid of him as fast as you can,” Gulick said, champagne flute in hand after Princess La Quinta had just given him his first graded-stakes win, capturing the Grade 3, $100,000 Arlington Matron Stakes by one length over Daddy’s Boo.

Gulick watched intently as the Matron replay was shown after the champagne toast in a room beneath the grandstand. He watched Princess La Quinta and Carlos Marquez Jr. settle into a nice stride, racing two wide with cover behind Moonlit Garden as Daddy’s Boo set the pace on Arlington’s Polytrack. The field rounded the second turn and Princess La Quinta traveled strongly, coming past Moonlit Garden as she approached the quarter-pole.

“Here’s where I blacked out,” Gulick joked, as Princess La Quinta came alongside a tiring Daddy’s Boo. Princess La Quinta is a tall, long-bodied filly, but she stretched herself low, straining to get to the front, making the lead in the final 100 yards and pushing out to a clear victory.

“It can’t be real,” said Gulick, who began coming to Arlington in 1991, was a fixture here from then until 2012, but stayed back in Florida during the summer when his stable dwindled to just a handful. Princess La Quinta, whom he owns in partnership with Al Moorehouse, is one of only six older horses in his string, and it’s a string that is absolutely on fire: Gulick won the first race Saturday with a horse that paid $94.80 and has won with five of six starters at the meet. This was his 12th runner in a graded stakes and before Princess La Quinta, none had finished as high as third.

Princess La Quinta, a daughter of Quality Road and the Tabasco Cat mare Social Scene, had a good 2017 at Arlington, finishing a close fifth on turf in the Grade 3 Pucker Up. She won a second-level allowance race here May 4 coming back from a spring break and took another forward step Saturday. She ran nine furlongs on the synthetic surface in 1:49.69 and paid just $8.80 after dropping from 6-1 to 3-1 moments before the race.

“She ran hard, just second-best today,” said jockey Jose Valdivia, who rode Daddy’s Boo. Con Te Partiro, the 13-1 favored, also tried her best, but raced from well off the field and could only finish third despite a solid stretch run.

Gulick is a story-teller, a lover of life in all its forms, a gadfly during morning training. It took him a good 10 minutes to get from the winner’s circle through the tunnel and out into the Arlington paddock because so many Arlington regulars stopped to congratulate him – a Grade 3 win for a Grade 1 human.