Forte, the 2-year-old male champion of 2022, has been retired from racing, co-owner Mike Repole announced Thursday afternoon.
He will stand stud at Spendthrift Farm in 2024.
Forte has not run since he finished fourth in the Grade 1 Travers at Saratoga on Aug. 26. He was battling a quarter crack early in the fall that kept trainer Todd Pletcher from being able to work him and ultimately time ran out to make the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
The Horseracing Integrity and Wagering Unit has withdrawn cases affecting two trainers after a review of its laboratory network turned up differing standards at the labs for the detection of metformin, a popular human drug used to manage diabetes, HIWU said on Thursday.
The trainers, Guadalupe Munoz Elizondo and Javier Morzan, had their provisional suspensions withdrawn after each had a single horse test positive for metformin after races in June. HIWU will not pursue any penalties against the two, the organization said.
Joseph Taylor, who was a leading trainer at Parx Racing outside of Philadelphia in the late 2010s, has been suspended six years by the Horseracing Integrity and Wagering Unit for violations involving two banned substances in two of his horses that raced at Parx in June.
The two horses, Classy American and Cajun Cousin, both tested positive for clenbuterol, a strictly regulated bronchial dilator that is prohibited in a post-race test, and methylphenidate, a central nervous system stimulant. Taylor was issued a provisional suspension after the positives were reported.
Only nine 3-year-olds have captured the Breeders’ Cup Sprint in the 39-year history of the event, the most recent being Drefong for trainer Bob Baffert at Santa Anita in 2016.
Drefong won the Sprint despite having made only five starts coming into the race, a résumé eerily similar to Baffert’s latest 3-year-old sprint star Speed Boat Beach, who will attempt to overcome his own relative inexperience taking on a field of vastly more accomplished rivals, including defending champion Elite Power.
Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott had his first Breeders’ Cup runner 37 years ago, in 1986. The following fall, Mott sent out the first of his 12 Breeders’ Cup winners, Theatrical in the Turf.
Thirty-five years after Theatrical, last November at Keeneland, Mott had his second two-win Breeders’ Cup, with Elite Power in the Sprint and Cody’s Wish in the Dirt Mile. Both horses, among eight Mott has aimed for this year’s Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita, return for a repeat bid in their respective races.
Zozos might get the first call out of the starting gate in the Grade 1, $1 million Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile on Nov. 4 at Santa Anita.
Zozos will be moving back to two turns off a wire-to-wire win in the Ack Ack on Sept. 30 at Churchill Downs. He earned a berth into the Dirt Mile for the victory and had his first work out of the race Sunday.
Zozos breezed a half-mile in 48.60 seconds at Churchill and the move confirmed Zozos for the Dirt Mile.
As under the radar as Mage was coming into the Kentucky Derby, it will be even more so when he runs in the $6 million Breeders’ Cup Classic on Nov. 4 at Santa Anita.
Coming out of a last-place finish in the Travers Stakes on Aug. 26, Mage has been mostly out of sight, out of mind since he returned to the Thoroughbred Training Center near Lexington, Ky., in early September.
The one certainty ahead of Monday’s pre-entry deadline for the Breeders’ Cup is that the newest kid on the block, the Juvenile Turf Sprint, should once again have an overflow field with an international cast. Since it was added to the Breeders’ Cup program in 2018, each edition has drawn a full field, with also-eligibles scratched off the program.
It was 10 years ago that a zippy gray mare became the first horse ever to win back-to-back editions of the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint, at Santa Anita, no less. A decade later, the popular gray Caravel is headed to Santa Anita to attempt to add her name to the list of doubles, and will be one of several shades of gray in this starting gate.
Since the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint was added to the program in 2008, the two-time winners of the race are the mare Mizdirection in 2012 and 2013, and Stormy Liberal, who earned a divisional Eclipse Award, in 2017 and 2018.
Formal research studies suggest the COVID-19 pandemic warped people’s sense of time. Take the Summer Stakes, for instance. The race was run at Woodbine on Sept. 16, not long ago at all, but it feels like the winner, Carson’s Run, has been forgotten.
While Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf prep races subsequently have been run in New York, Kentucky, and California, Carson’s Run has quietly gone about his business at Saratoga, his daily training overseen by Miguel Clement, the son of and assistant to trainer Christophe Clement.
