Thousand Words, Honor A. P. headed to Kentucky Derby

DEL MAR, Calif. – Thousand Words and Honor A. P. are both headed to the Kentucky Derby on Sept. 5 at Churchill Downs after emerging in good order from the Shared Belief Stakes on Saturday at Del Mar, their trainers said Sunday morning.

The Shared Belief was the final West Coast prep for the Derby, and it produced a surprisingly high 104 Beyer Speed Figure after the four runners all finished within 1 1/2 lengths of each other.

Andrew Beyer said the track variant – a measure of the track surface’s speed for the day - for the Shared Belief and the only other two-turn dirt race here on Saturday (race 5), was the same. He said the difference in raw times between those two races produced final figures that reflected that variant. Basically, if the runners in race 5 were judged to have run fairly close to par, which they were, the runners in race 2 had to get considerably faster numbers if the variant was consistent.

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So, Thousand Words received a career-best figure for the race, and Honor A. P. equaled his previous performance, in which he got a 102 when winning the Santa Anita Derby.

Thousand Words “came back great,” said his trainer, Bob Baffert, “He wasn’t even tired.”

Thousand Words is the second Baffert trainee now set for the Derby, following Haskell winner Authentic, who had his first breeze since the Haskell on Saturday, when he went an easy half-mile in 50.20 seconds. A third colt, Uncle Chuck, will have his status determined based on how he performs in the Travers Stakes on Saturday at Saratoga.

Cezanne, who finished last of four in the Shared Belief, is off the Derby trail, Baffert said.

“He got tired,” Baffert said. “He just flattened out. He wasn’t quite ready for that.”

Honor A. P. “looks good today,” his trainer, John Shirreffs, said Sunday morning.

“We wanted to win the race, but I thought he looked really good at the end,” Shirreffs said. “A mile and a sixteenth was a little iffy.”

Honor A. P. won the Santa Anita Derby going 1 1/8 miles, and will get 1 1/4 miles in the Derby.

Shirreffs on Sunday reiterated what jockey Mike Smith expressed on Saturday, the hope that jockeys would be allowed to work horses in coming weeks at Del Mar. Both believe the partnership between Smith and Honor A. P. benefits from Smith working the horse, too. At Santa Anita, jockeys were allowed to work horses if the horses were brought straight to the paddock, where the jockey would climb aboard, and where they would dismount after the work, thus keeping the jockeys away from the stable area.

So far, Del Mar has not allowed a similar setup for workouts. Jockeys are not allowed in the stable area at Del Mar.

“It’s something we’re continuing to monitor,” Josh Rubinstein, Del Mar’s president and chief operating officer, said Sunday. “We’re talking to the jockeys, talking to the trainers. We understand the desire for jockeys to be able to work horses.”