Royal Son gives Prescott rare shot at graded stakes win

Rodney Prescott has ridden 3,237 winners in his 22-year career. He rode 340 winners in 2005, finishing second among all North American riders that year to Hall-of-Famer Russell Baze, and he has long been highly regarded by his peers. He was selected as one of five finalists for the 2013 George Woolf Memorial Award, won by Mario Pino.

In a career with many highs, one of the few things the 41-year-old Prescott hasn’t done is win a graded stakes race. According to Daily Racing Form statistics, he is 0 for 9 in such races, with his best finishes being a pair of thirds.

Saturday, Prescott will be riding Royal Son in the Grade 3, $550,000 Spiral Stakes at Turfway Park, giving him an opportunity to fill that hole in his racing résumé. Royal Son has already won over Turfway’s Polytrack synthetic surface, taking the John Battaglia, the prep for the Spiral, by 5 1/4 lengths and earning a Spiral-best 97 Beyer Speed Figure.

Prescott, who when not riding at Turfway mostly hangs his tack in Ohio and Indiana, was given the mount on Royal Son by seven-time Eclipse Award-winning trainer Todd Pletcher.

Elliott Walden, racing manager for WinStar Farm, which owns Royal Son, said that when Pletcher’s regular go-to jockeys, Javier Castellano and John Velazquez, were committed elsewhere Saturday, he and Pletcher came to the decision to give Prescott the opportunity.

Walden recalled the evening Royal Son and Prescott won the John Battaglia.

“We had two horses up at Turfway that night,” Walden said. “And Rodney rode them both to perfection.”

Prescott put Royal Son on the lead in the Battaglia on a night when front-runners were often successful, and coaxed him into setting an easy pace.

Prescott said he found out a few days after the Battaglia that he would likely be riding Royal Son back in the Spiral.

“I’m glad to be riding him again,” Prescott said in a phone interview Tuesday, adding that Pletcher “didn’t owe me anything.”

To a large extent his winless record in graded stakes and limited opportunities in rich races are a result of where he has ridden in his career. For instance, Turfway has just two graded stakes races now, the other being the Grade 3 Bourbonette on the Spiral card.

Prescott, who is tied for third in the Turfway rider standings, isn’t new to the Spiral. One of his two thirds in graded stakes races came in the 2009 running, when his mount, Proceed Bee, finished behind Hold Me Back and Flying Private.

His most-recent Spiral mount came in 2011, when he rode Taptowne to a fifth-place finish behind Animal Kingdom, who subsequently won the Kentucky Derby.

As a veteran in the jockey ranks, Prescott has learned not to expect to get the ride back on every mount . He seems content in the state of his career, riding mostly at smaller tracks such as Turfway, Indiana Downs, and Belterra Park, with occasional opportunities at Churchill Downs and Keeneland.

Of seemingly greater importance to him are the roots he has established in the area. He and his family – wife, Beth; daughter, Anna; and son, Austin – reside in Cincinnati, and Turfway Park in Florence, Ky., is but a short drive from the city.

“This is just home,” he said.