Toronado inherits role of favorite in BC Mile

On Monday, the Breeders’ Cup Mile lost its favorite, but one day later, it officially found another one.

Not that there is any replacing Wise Dan, whose ankle injury, announced Monday, will keep him from attempting to win the Mile for the third year in a row. Wise Dan apparently hurt himself while winning the Shadwell Turf Mile on Oct. 4, sustaining a small fracture in his lower right foreleg, and whether the 7-year-old gelding races again won’t be determined for weeks, if not months.

What was determined Tuesday was that Toronado will ship from England for the Mile, and while he comes nowhere near compensating for the loss of Wise Dan, he stands a good chance of going off favored in the race.

Toronado might have come to the Mile in any case, but had the course at Ascot in England not gotten saturated with rain in recent days, the ground turning soft-to-heavy, Toronado at least would have run first in the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes on Saturday, leaving just a short break before the BC Mile. But Toronado prefers to race on top of the ground, not down in it, and his connections are passing the QE II and going straight to Santa Anita.

“It made sense to reroute Toronado to California, especially after Wise Dan came out, and he’ll go there with a big chance,” trainer Richard Hannon Jr. said on his website this week.

:: BREEDERS’ CUP 2014: See DRF’s top contenders

Toronado, a 4-year-old owned by Al Shaqab Racing, has won six of 11 career starts and has a win and two seconds in 2014. He won his seasonal debut in the Group 1 Queen Anne Stakes, a race in which Anodin, another Mile hope, finished third, and then was second to the mighty Kingman in the Group 1 Sussex Stakes and second, beaten a head, in the Group 1 Prix du Moulin de Longchamp on Sept. 14, his most recent start.

Toronado, a son of BC Turf winner High Chaparral, has speed and should like the fast, short-cut course at Santa Anita, though he has yet to race left-handed, the direction of travel in North America. He far better suits the Mile than Olympic Glory, who checked in ninth in the 2013 Mile for the same connections two weeks after romping over boggy turf in the QE II.

This will be the first official U.S. starter for Hannon, who formally took over one of England’s leading operations this year from his father, Richard Hannon Sr. The younger Hannon appears to have fewer qualms about shipping for North American races than did his father, whose records both in U.S. races generally and in the Breeders’ Cup particularly do not inspire confidence. Richard Hannon Sr.’s overall American record was 16-0-1-0, and eight of his nine Breeders’ Cup runners finished eighth or worse. Only Paco Boy mildly contended, coming home fourth in Goldikova’s 2010 Mile win.

Toronado, though, might be a better horse than anything the Hannon operation has sent to earlier Breeders’ Cups, and with Wise Dan out of the picture, he will land in a spot ripe to reverse the historical Hannon trend.