Will it be Wilbo or Wabel at the wire?
A pair of 4-year-olds with upside and oddly similar names, Wilbo and Wabel, hold appeal in the $100,000 Iowa Sprint Handicap on Saturday at Prairie Meadows.
Wilbo shaded Wabel when the pair met in an allowance race last fall at Keeneland, but Wabel looks like the horse that has made more recent progress, and he’s the pick to score a mild upset in what looks like a highly contentious edition of the six-furlong Iowa Sprint. The Iowa Sprint is the lead-in to the featured Cornhusker Handicap on the Prairie Meadows card.
The race drew nine entrants, and it’s really difficult even to say who will be favored. If bettors gravitate toward recent performance, W. B. Smudge could wind up a mild choice. Making his most recent start in a stakes-class allowance race at Churchill, W. B. Smudge won by more than three lengths and earned a 103 Beyer Speed Figure, a performance that probably would get his picture taken Saturday, too. But W. B. Smudge is a 7-year-old, and that was the very best performance of his 50-start career. Trainer Matt Kordenbrock has given W. B. Smudge a six-week break to try and avoid regression, but it might be inevitable.
Few trainers are more conscious about how their horses will react to a top effort than Brad Cox, and he has given Wabel time to recover from a hard-fought May 22 allowance-race win at Churchill. That race came over seven furlongs, and Wabel, who has started only nine times, might be better at six furlongs, or so a March allowance-race win at Oaklawn suggests.
Wilbo also won well over the winter at Oaklawn, but has not started since he made a run at the high-class sprinter Subtle Indian and faded to fourth in a Feb. 13 allowance there. He has posted a series of encouraging drills, though, and could run well fresh.
Gentlemen’s Bet won this race in 2013 but is nowhere near the horse now he was then. Candip was smushed by W. B. Smudge last time and ran the two best races of his career at Gulfstream. Storm Power won the local prep for the Iowa Sprint, but beat only four foes in mud and needs to move forward again. Dream Saturday, in from California for trainer Jerry Hollendorfer, drops from Grade 2 competition and looks like a horse best in longer one-turn races.