ARCADIA, Calif. – Handicapping uncertainties abound Friday on an unpretentious eight-race card at Santa Anita.
The ambiguities include a front-runner on an anti-speed course, a likely favorite in a maiden race who lost his first 21 starts, allowance sprint fillies experimenting at two turns, and a deep closer trying to get up at five furlongs in the shortest race of the day.
BALTIMORE – Avoiding favorites in the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes has been sage advice, the public choice having not won this Grade 2, $300,000 race for 3-year-old fillies since Royal Delta beat four horses in 2011.
Identifying the favorite in Friday’s 100th running of the Black-Eyed Susan at Pimlico is no easy task with four of the eight runners pegged between 5-2 and 9-2 on the morning line and only one having been successful in graded competition.
ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Turf racing returns to Woodbine this week with the first race scheduled for the inner course on Friday when rain is in the forecast.
Tim Lawson, Woodbine’s vice president of racing, said turf season is beginning earlier than usual because of covers that were installed over the course last fall for the winter.
BALTIMORE – The Maryland-based fillies Cap Classique and Miss Harriett were nominated to several stakes on Friday’s Black-Eyed Susan card at Pimlico Race Course, with their connections pondering distance and surface preferences and watching the weather forecast. Ultimately, both wound up in the Grade 3, $150,000 Miss Preakness Stakes at six furlongs on dirt, where they will take on the formidable Kentucky shipper Youalmosthadme.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Like people, most horses also tend to slow down the older they get. One exception to that rule is the ageless Bluefield, who had the best year of her career as a 7-year-old in 2023 and ran the best race of her life shortly after turning 8 earlier this year.
BALTIMORE – D. Wayne Lukas still remembers coming through the Pimlico stable gate the morning after Codex defeated the Kentucky Derby-winning filly Genuine Risk in the 1980 Preakness and being handed a bag of mail from the security guard.
“I’m feeling pretty good, just won my first classic. He says, ‘Wow, you got a bag of mail, lot of telegrams came in overnight’ and he gives me the mailbag,” Lukas recalled Monday morning at Pimlico. “I sit down in the tack room, [former Daily Racing Form executive columnist] Joe Hirsch sits down there and I start to open them.
Can history repeat itself? That’s one question for Santa Anita Derby runner-up Imagination in the Preakness Stakes. The colt races for many of the same connections as last year’s Preakness winner, National Treasure, and is from the same extended female family as that colt – one that has had a great deal of success throughout racing history.
Uncle Mo is, in less than a decade with runners on the track, already an accomplished classic influence as the sire of Kentucky Derby winner Nyquist and Belmont Stakes winner Mo Donegal. With his progeny continuing to produce runners who excel in the second generation, he added another accomplishment to his résumé as the broodmare sire of recent Kentucky Oaks winner Thorpedo Anna. He has a chance to continue building his reputation in that regard with Muth, one of the favorites for the Preakness Stakes.
