After an unscheduled month of not being able to run his horses, trainer Jim Ryerson gets back in action Sunday at Aqueduct with four entrants on the eight-race card.
Belmont Park’s barn 15, where Ryerson has 15 horses stabled, was placed under quarantine Feb. 3 when a horse in that barn conditioned by another trainer had to be euthanized due to a case of equine herpesvirus. Horses in that barn could not be entered for 21 days, basically the remainder of February.
ARCADIA, Calif. – Regarding the richest Grade 1 on Sunday at Santa Anita, and the top contenders in the $400,000 race – better late than never.
The Santa Anita Handicap will in fact be run this weekend, albeit a day later than scheduled. The Big Cap and three supporting stakes were switched from Saturday to Sunday due to the threat of rain. The postponement is fitting; the main Big Cap entrants are late developers.
As horses prepared for the 2021 Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co.’s March sale of 2-year-olds in training, which was set to kick off that season after the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic had ravaged the prior year’s breeze-up calendar, a gray colt by Race Day, a stallion exported to Korea a few months prior, breezed a furlong in a modest 10 2/5 seconds.
Horse of the Year Authentic was a breakout horse for dominant stallion Into Mischief, becoming his sire’s first classic winner and never finishing worse than second in eight starts while earning more than $7.2 million. He looks to extend his sire’s influence as a highly anticipated freshman sire of 2024.
Mitole, Maximus Mischief, Vino Rosso, and Omaha Beach, all standing at Spendthrift Farm, finished in the top four places on the 2023 freshman sire earnings list, with all four of them recording multiple stakes winners.
After some adjustments in recent years, the major-market 2-year-olds in training sale season in North America for 2024 looks similar to 2023. Although there will be opportunities for juveniles to change hands at regional sales, digital sales, or at summer and fall racing-age sales, much of the activity will be focused on six physical sales held from March to June by the three major auction houses.
Guanare is unbeaten from three starts since moving into the Rick Dutrow barn, and the Runhappy colt stretches out around two turns for the first time in Tuesday’s $75,000 City of Brotherly Love, a mile and 70-yard stakes for 3-year-olds at Parx Racing.
Easter was a good turf horse in the first 18 months after his arrival from France in the winter of 2021-22, winning allowance races at Aqueduct and Belmont Park.
What he has accomplished since late October in California has taken his status to a higher level. Easter has won three consecutive stakes at Santa Anita and Del Mar, and will start in a Grade 1 for the first time in nearly two years in Sunday’s $300,000 Frank Kilroe Mile.
California’s firmer turf courses are a primary reason for the winning streak, trainer Phil D’Amato said earlier this week.
A Dutch company with broad experience in timing motorsports and other types of racing has begun marketing a similar system to horse racing tracks that could provide a solution to ongoing and stubborn timing problems at U.S. tracks.
Ruby Nell, who starts in Sunday’s Grade 2 Buena Vista Stakes at Santa Anita, should be on a two-race winning streak in trainer Richard Mandella’s mind.
After a comprehensive win in the Lady of Shamrock Stakes at a mile on turf on Dec. 31 at Santa Anita, in which she led throughout, Ruby Nell finished a troubled third in her first start outside of California in the Grade 2 Pegasus World Cup Filly and Mare Turf Invitational on Jan. 27 at Gulfstream Park.
