West Coast to stand at Lane's End in 2019

Breeders' Cup Classic candidate West Coast, last year's champion 3-year-old male, will join the Lane's End Farm stallion roster in 2019, the farm has announced.

West Coast, a Flatter colt who races for Gary and Mary West, finished second to Accelerate, another future Lane's End stallion, in last Saturday's Grade 1 Awesome Again Stakes. That marked his first start since finishing second in the Dubai World Cup six months prior.

West Coast won five consecutive races in 2017 to move himself into championship contention. After taking the listed Easy Goer Stakes at Belmont and the Grade 3 Los Alamitos Derby at the eponymous track, he stepped into Grade 1 company for the first time and posted a 3 1/4-length victory in the Travers Stakes. The field included all three winners of that spring's Triple Crown races - Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming (ninth), Preakness Stakes winner Cloud Computing (eighth), and Belmont Stakes winner Tapwrit (fourth).

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West Coast went on to a 7 1/4-length victory in the Grade 1 Pennsylvania Derby. He then finished third behind subsequent Horse of the Year Gun Runner in the Breeders' Cup Classic, and was second to Gun Runner in the Pegasus World Cup in January prior to his trip to Dubai.

“I shipped him four times, west to east and then to Dubai, and he ran a huge race every time,” trainer Bob Baffert said in a release. “He’s been first or second in all but one start, never off the board, and won at five different tracks. All the while taking on, and beating some of the best horses in the world. The good ones like him, they’re just different.”

West Coast is out of Caressing, the champion juvenile filly of 2000. Caressing has also produced graded stakes-placed Gold Hawk and Juan and Bina, and is the second dam of Japanese Group 3 winner Danon Legend.

“West Coast is a champion out of a champion," Lane's End's Will Farish said in the release. "Not only has he proven that he’s an exceptional racehorse, but he descends from the A.P. Indy sireline, out of a champion mare, picked out by a highly respected judge. He’s a very exciting addition to our roster."