Ready to Repeat points to Soaring Free Stakes

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – You knew it could be a great day for the Coxes last Sunday when Greg Cox won the second race with Soexotic. Six races later, his wife, Gail, took the $104,200 Victoria Stakes for 2-year-olds with the favored Ready to Repeat, a speedy son of More Than Ready who could be going places.

Ready to Repeat came close to breaking the course record when graduating second time out July 12 on the inner turf. After starting a bit slowly in the Victoria on the Tapeta, he went to the lead and never looked back to win comfortably with a 74 Beyer Speed Figure.

“I didn’t really intend to run him in the Victoria,” Gail Cox said. “I didn’t like the three weeks [back], but it looked like it was coming up light, and it seemed silly to not go in there.”

Cox hopes to run Ready to Repeat back in the $100,000 Soaring Free Stakes, a 6 1/2-furlong sprint on the main turf here Aug. 23.

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Cox sent out the restricted maiden winner All Canadian to finish fifth in the Victoria, and she plans on running him back in the $250,000 Simcoe Stakes for graduates of local yearling sales Aug. 30. His inside draw led to rating tactics being employed so that he wouldn’t link up with his stablemate on the lead, and Cox said she wasn’t disappointed with his performance.

“On the turn, a horse came over and he had to take up and got stepped on a little bit,” Cox recalled. “If that hadn’t have happened, he might have been third.”

Cox’s stable star, El Tormenta, the 2019 Canadian champion male turf runner, recently returned to Woodbine after a freshening. El Tormenta won last year’s Grade 1 Woodbine Mile in an upset over Got Stormy and subsequently finished sixth in the Breeders’ Cup Mile. His two races this year in stakes at Gulfstream were subpar after he didn’t get his preferred covered-up trip.

“I don’t think he loved the Gulfstream turf course,” Cox said.

Cox said she was unsure whether El Tormenta would be ready to defend his title in the $1 million Woodbine Mile on Sept 19.

* The Kentucky-bred Ready to Repeat was a bargain $60,000 Keeneland September yearling sale purchase by Cox. It’s a sale that she attends annually, but probably not this year due to the 14-day quarantine that Canadians must undergo when returning from the United States due to the pandemic.

“I think it will be impossible for me to go there, because I can’t take two weeks off here,” Cox explained. “I might have to look at videos and get a friend I respect to go have a look. We always get something at that sale.”

* Friday’s featured third race drew six fillies and mares who will negotiate 1 1/8 miles in a first-level allowance. The semis of the Woodbine Turf Sprint Series was called off.