Cutting back to her favorite distance, Key of Life is the only prior graded stakes winner in the group of seven 3-year-old fillies lining up for the Grade 3, $150,000 Miss Preakness Stakes on Friday at Pimlico.
BALTIMORE – Grade 1 winner Rattle N Roll is the 9-5 morning-line favorite and the 126-pound highweight in Friday’s Grade 3, $250,000 Pimlico Special for 3-year-olds and up at 1 3/16 miles.
Trained by Kenny McPeek for Lucky Seven Stable, Rattle N Roll captured the Grade 1 Breeders’ Futurity as a 2-year-old in 2021. Briefly on the Kentucky Derby trail last year, McPeek turned his attention to easier spots during the summer and fall, and Rattle N Roll responded by winning the American Derby at Churchill, the St. Louis Derby at FanDuel, and the Grade 3 Oklahoma Derby at Remington.
BALTIMORE – Having dominated her division in Southern California, the unbeaten Faiza ships east for the first time to take on a large field of 3-year-old fillies in Friday’s Grade 2, $300,000 Black-Eyed Susan Stakes at Pimlico.
The Black-Eyed Susan shares billing with the Grade 3, $250,000 Pimlico Special as two of six stakes on a 14-race, Preakness Eve card that begins at 11:30 a.m.
Faiza, a daughter of Girvin trained by Bob Baffert, is 5 for 5 with four graded stakes victories, the most recent one coming by 6 1/2 lengths in the Grade 2 Santa Anita Oaks.
BALTIMORE – Can the Queen has changed trainers but not barns since she won the The Very One Stakes a year ago at Pimlico.
A 6-1 wire-to-wire winner of the The Very One in 2022, Can the Queen was trained at the time by Rodolpho Sanchez-Salomon. Late last summer, she began racing for trainer Joanne Shankle. Shankle is Sanchez-Salomon’s assistant.
“His wife, too,” Shankle said, reached Tuesday by telephone.
ARCADIA, Calif. – Before the turf-sprint stakes program at Santa Anita continues Saturday on the hillside course, the standard protocol applies to maiden turf sprinters on Friday.
Hillside racing resumed in fall 2021 after a 2 1/2-year interlude. Since its comeback, use of the downhill course has been limited. Hillside races are reserved for winners only; turf-sprint maidens run only on the main oval. That includes three of the first five races Friday.
ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Minor stakes winner Pleasure’s Gold comes off the sidelines in Friday’s Woodbine headliner, a nonwinners-of-three event combining Ontario-sired allowance types with $40,000 claimers. If ready, the 6 1/2-furlong sprint could be hers for the taking.
BALTIMORE – Every spring, hard on the third Saturday in May, racing scribes fire up “new shooters” pieces, stories about horses who skipped the Kentucky Derby and ran in the Preakness Stakes.
The main story this year concerns not a new shooter but a lone soldier, Mage, the only horse among eight Preakness entrants racing in the second leg of the Triple Crown after contesting the first.
This is the second in a three-part series examining Secretariat’s influence on the Thoroughbred bloodstock industry as we mark the 50-year anniversary of his historic Triple Crown triumphs. This week, learn about Big Red’s record as a sire, with his breakthrough performer in the American classics being Preakness and Belmont Stakes winner Risen Star, 35 years ago.
