Reporting Star heading to Kentucky

Reporting Star, determined half-length winner of Saturday’s Grade 3 Appleton Stakes at Gulfstream Park, will be shipped in the next week-to-10 days to Keeneland, where his trainer, Brendan Walsh, will have myriad options.

Though the Appleton was at a mile, Reporting Star has hit the board in races at 1 1/4 miles and 1 1/2 miles, which makes a race like the Grade 2, $250,000 Elkhorn going 1 1/2 miles at Keeneland on April 23 a consideration. Of course, there’s also the $500,000 Woodford Reserve at Churchill Downs at 1 1/8 miles that is also under consideration.

“You’d have to take think he’d be very live in a race like that,” Walsh said Sunday.

The Appleton was Reporting Star’s first start for Walsh, who had trained horses for the owner Merriebelle Farm in the past. Walsh only had the horse about five weeks leading up to the Appleton, but the way the horse trained “I knew he was sitting on a big one,” said Walsh, who added he wasn’t sure if Reporting Star would be good enough to beat graded stakes winners Divisidero and Force the Pass, who finished heads part when second and third in the Appleton.

Walsh said the rain that fell early in the day “probably helped” Reporting Star’s chances.