Weekend GamePlan: Picks for Oaklawn Handicap, Elkhorn
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Not one, but two older male dirt-route graded stakes races on April 22. Put them together and we’d really have something. Rainy forecasts in some jurisdictions, including Keeneland, cloud the picture. What’s clear: As always, we’re looking for value in two Saturday stakes.
Oaklawn Handicap
If the Oaklawn Handicap were a morning workout, I’d side with Charge It, a horse who has breezed like a beast since early in his 3-year-old season and continues looking very strong in online workout video.
Less strong: His actual performance in races.
Charge It in his 2023 debut gutted out an allowance win over Vittorio, who came back to finish a soundly beaten fourth in the Essex Handicap, and instead of improving in his second start, he took a step back when defeated by the solid but limited Endorsed. Charge It put up a big number last summer when he got a perfect trip against overmatched competition – you know, a race that might have felt to him like a morning workout. At 8-5 on the morning line, it could pay to be skeptical.
Of the two shortest prices, I’d favor Last Samurai, whose 9-1-1-2 record at this 1 1/8-mile trip belies his suitability to the distance. The horse loves Oaklawn and enters in the best form of his life – and therein lies a concern. Last Samurai has been steadily racing since October and after hitting a two-race peak seems vulnerable to regression.
It’s hard to see why Stilleto Boy would be 8-1 here and the horse he just beat in the Santa Anita Handicap, Proxy, 4-1. Stilleto Boy ought to be a shorter number while Proxy should offer fair value, and I’m siding with him.
Proxy perpetually frustrates. The horse has a measure of positional pace that he usually declines to deploy, and it was his inability to keep up down the backstretch at Santa Anita that kept his strong outside run from reaching Stilleto Boy. Note that after the March 4 Big Cap, Proxy quickly showed up on the Fair Grounds work tab March 19 going a swift half-mile, and his work pattern has continued encouragingly.
He hated the kickback from post 1 at Gulfstream while finishing fastest in the Pegasus, will get a strong pace at which to run Saturday, and races on Lasix for the first time since a fine second behind mighty Olympiad in the 2022 New Orleans Classic.
Elkhorn
Rain on Friday into Saturday might change the way the Keeneland turf has played – but it might not. Front-runners have gotten the best of things on grass of late, and Rising Empire could be loose on an easy Elkhorn lead.
Is he good enough to capitalize on a pace advantage? The price will be right to guess he can.
While Rising Empire is a 5-year-old with 13 starts, he remains relatively unexposed; only his last three races have come on turf and he has started in blinkers just four times. The combination of the surface switch and equipment addition produced a career-best showing in the Muniz Memorial at Fair Grounds, where Rising Empire set the pace and held clear all but the highly capable Spooky Channel.
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Rising Empire does look like the sort of horse who could gallop all day, and if jockey Florent Geroux plays his cards right, he might open a wide enough lead at the quarter pole to hold off a slew of deep closers.
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