Ward returns home with Touchy in Longacres Mile
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On nomination day, the potential field for the 91st running of the $125,000 Longacres Mile bloomed with possibility. Twenty-two older horses were nominated, including prospects trained by Bob Baffert, Wesley Ward, Jose D’Angelo, Mark Glatt, and Dan Blacker.
In the end, however, only Ward is shipping in for Emerald Downs’s marquee race on Sunday. His stakes-placed Touchy, last seen winning a one-mile Churchill Downs allowance with a $134,000 purse on June 10 for Three Chimneys, is the 7-5 morning-line favorite against seven local runners in the ninth race on a 12-race card that includes six stakes.
Ward has a personal connection to the race and the area. As a jockey in the 1980s, he raced at Longacres and Yakima Meadows, the latter of which was located near his birthplace of Selah, Wash. Starting out as a trainer in the early 1990s, he saddled horses at both woebegone racetracks.
“The Longacres Mile is a race I’ve seen my whole life growing up and I watch it every year,” Ward said. “I grew up on the backside at Longacres as a little boy. It’s a race that I’d love to win, for sure.”
Ward likes his chances, and he should. Touchy earned a field-best 95 Beyer Speed Figure for his nose win on June 10, and the 4-year-old Kentucky-bred will get the services of one of the nation’s winningest jockeys in teenage wunderkind Yedsit Hazlewood.
“I wouldn’t have sent him all the way out there unless I thought we had a really good chance,” Ward said. Goncalo “Torrealba, who owns Three Chimneys, he knows this is a race that is near and dear to my heart.”
Trainer Blaine Wright, who trains 2-1 second shot Si That Tiger, said he wasn’t particularly surprised the race came up relatively soft.
“Who knows if those guys were ever serious about coming up,” Wright said of the big-name trainers who opted not to ship. “It’s a long way to go for that amount.”
Emerald’s all-time winningest stakes trainer, Tom Wenzel, had a slightly different take.
“I guess it is a little surprising that it’s this light. It’s not like it’s a small purse,” said Wenzel, who will start 2022 Longacres Mile winner Slew’s Tiz Whiz (4-1). “I thought there might be somebody else, but when you look at the nominees, so many of the horses were off the bench. The Mile is a tough race off a layoff.”
Touchy finished second on debut in the Tremont Stakes at Saratoga in June 2024. Whatever Kentucky Derby hopes he might have harbored were dashed when finishing third, nine lengths behind Getaway Car, in the Sunland Derby the following year, but he’s improved since then and has the tactical speed to win when either on or off the lead.
In his prime, Slew’s Tiz Whiz, who crossed the wire seventh in last year’s Mile, would have vied for favoritism with Touchy, but the 8-year-old seems to have finally lost a step. Just two weeks ago, there was some doubt that he’d even be entered in his fifth Mile, but the late-running son of Slew’s Tiznow punched his ticket with a neck win in a one-mile allowance on Aug. 1 despite having to close into a middling pace, something that shouldn’t be an issue Sunday.
“The pace was really pedestrian for that level,” Wenzel said of the Aug. 1 tuneup. “For him to kind of sneak through, I thought it was a solid effort. My horse is a one-way-run horse. I’m at the mercy of what they want to do up front. I’ve got confidence in my horse. Touchy, this horse is probably a level above what we’re running around here.”
The horse with the most realistic chance of upsetting Touchy is Si That Tiger, a stone front-runner who won the 6 1/2-furlong Governor’s Stakes by 3 1/4 lengths over Slew’s Tiz Whiz and another Mile entrant, Executive Chef. Having earned a career-high 88 Beyer in that win, the 4-year-old has only routed twice in his 11-race career, crossing the wire second in the 1 1/16-mile Muckleshoot Derby a year ago before getting disqualified from purse money due to a medication violation.
“It’s been our goal all year long to get to this race,” Wright said. “We’re happy to be in the position we’re in.”
He’s Not Talking (12-1 on Sunday) won last year’s Muckleshoot Derby but has not run back to that race since, while another 4-year-old Mile entrant, Adios Jojo (15-1), will compete in his first stakes race of 2026 for the meet’s winningest trainer, Howie Gibson.
“I don’t think it’s that big of a swing,” Gibson said. “Everybody else in there is the same horse. Si That Tiger hasn’t been super impressive routing. I think it’s a pretty wide-open race after Wesley’s horse.”
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