Woodbine: Marketing Mix preps for Nassau

Marketing Mix, who won the 1 1/4-mile Wonder Where Stakes in her first start on the turf here last year, breezed five furlongs in 1:00 at Arlington Park on Thursday morning and is slated to return to Woodbine for next Saturday’s Nassau Stakes.

The Nassau, a one-mile turf race for fillies and mares, offers Grade 2 status and a guaranteed purse of $300,000 plus $60,000 for Ontario-breds.

“She went good,” said Tom Proctor, who trains Marketing Mix for Leonard Lavin’s Glen Hill Farm. “I’ll probably try to send her up early, maybe even Sunday, because of the holiday here Monday.”

Bred in Ontario by Sean Fitzhenry, Marketing Mix used the Wonder Where as her launching pad to a very successful late-season turf campaign.
Her three subsequent 2011 outings produced wins in Arlington’s Grade 3 Pucker Up and the Grade 2 Mrs. Revere at Churchill Downs and a second in the Grade 1 Queen Elizabeth II Cup at Keeneland..

Returning to action at Keeneland this April, Marketing Mix won a one-mile classified turf allowance in convincing fashion. The second-place finisher there was Inglorious, who is based here at Woodbine with trainer Josie Carroll and also is Nassau-bound.

Marketing Mix’s subsequent outing was disappointing, however, as she finished fourth over good going in the Grade 2 Distaff Turf Mile at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby Day

“She wasn’t running up to par,” said Proctor. “But it had rained earlier in the day, and she was down there on the rail, on the worst part of the track.”