In horse racing, one out of three is not bad at all, and that’s the Grade 1 tally for trainer Brendan Walsh after two weekends of stakes racing at the Keeneland meeting. In truth, only one of those three actually ran a race: Expensive Queen dead-heated for first with Segesta on April 11 in the Jenny Wiley Stakes. The Walsh-trained Lush Lips probably would have been favored in the Jenny Wiley had she not been scratched after showing signs of some sort of illness late last week. On April 4, Clicquot took all sorts of betting action making her 4-year-old debut in the Madison Stakes. She sat a decent trip to the three-furlong marker before stopping quite suddenly, eased under the wire. Walsh said he could point to nothing specific that led to Clicquot’s no-show. “It was a little bit of a head scratcher,” Walsh said. “She’s back galloping. We’ll just let her tell us when she’s ready to do something more. We want to see she’s 200 percent.” :: Keeneland Spring Meet! Get DRF Past Performances, picks, news, and more. Lush Lips, winner of the Grade 1 Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup in October, on the evening of April 10 showed signs of not being quite herself. “We had an inkling, and we pulled a blood on her, which we do a lot anyway,” Walsh said. Nothing serious, but Lush Lips had to miss her major spring goal. “She’s just going to need a few quiet days and hopefully she’ll be back training again.” Expensive Queen, a European import, showed so much winning a Keeneland allowance race in her North American debut last spring that Walsh sent her straight to the Grade 1 Gamely at Santa Anita. Expensive Queen bloodied her head smashing it on the starting gate pre-race, and nagging foot problems took her out of training for several months. She came back as good as she went out, however, winning a Gulfstream Park allowance race and the Marie Krantz Memorial at Fair Grounds before knocking out her first graded stakes win of any sort in the Jenny Wiley. Expensive Queen likely runs next in a Grade 1 during Belmont Stakes week at Saratoga, but whether that’s in the one-mile Just a Game or the 1 3/16-mile New York remains to be seen, Walsh said. :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.