Churchill Downs
Wednesday, May 3
Weather: Clear
Temperature: 46
Track: Fast
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The gangs all here, the heavy lifting is over, the hardest part for everybody now is the wait until the horses are saddled up and sent away from the gate in Friday’s Kentucky Oaks and Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.
Ross Fenstermaker, who trained Precisionist to the 1985 sprint championship and nearly won the Breeders’ Cup Classic with him in 1986, died in late April, according to his friends.
Fenstermaker was 83 and had battled the effects of a stroke.
Precisionist was by far Fenstermaker’s most successful runner in a 20-year training career from 1976 to 1996.
Owned and bred by Fred Hooper, Precisionist was effective at a variety of distances. In his title year of 1985, Precisionist won the BC Sprint at Aqueduct after a layoff of more than four months.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Derma Sotogake, the UAE Derby winner, and Sun Thunder, the Risen Star Stakes runner-up, put in workouts Tuesday morning as major preparations for Saturday’s Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs begin to wind down.
The Arkansas and Texas breeding programs have named award winners for 2022.
Mrs. Beans is the Arkansas-bred of the year, said Deana Echols, executive director of the Arkansas Thoroughbred Breeders’ and Horsemen’s Association. He won 5 of 13 starts last year, and earned $282,238.
Mrs. Beans is a 5-year-old gelding by Cyber Secret who was bred by Sanders Brothers. The horse races for Danny Caldwell and is entered in Thursday's sixth race at Oaklawn Park.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Wet Paint was installed as the 5-2 morning-line favorite in a full field of 14 fillies for the Grade 1, $1.25 million Kentucky Oaks, set to be contested for the 149th time on Friday at Churchill Downs.
Wet Paint has won the Martha Washington Stakes, Grade 3 Honeybee Stakes, and Grade 2 Fantasy Stakes, all at Oaklawn Park, in her three most recent outings. A Godolphin homebred, Wet Paint will break from post 7 under Flavien Prat for the 1 1/8-mile race.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - The suspense ended early for Forte and his trainer Todd Pletcher.
Forte was the first name called in Monday’s post-position draw, and he was assigned stall 15 for Saturday’s $3 million Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs where he was installed as the 3-1 morning-line favorite on Churchill Downs’ line-maker Mike Battaglia’s morning-line. Daily Racing Form’s David Aragona made Forte the 7-2 morning-line favorite.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that 19.1 percent of U.S. adults had any anxiety disorder in the past year, while 8.4 percent had at least one major depressive episode. Those figures would represent approximately 3.8 people and 1.7 people, respectively, out of a group of 20.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Trainer Steve Asmussen sometimes watches the replay of the 2022 Kentucky Derby, just not from start to finish.
“I don’t think I’ve sat through the opening of the gates all the way to the wire because it’s like, ‘Are you serious?’ ” Asmussen said. “It don’t bother me when I’m not thinking about it. Do I think about it? What?”
Asmussen is Thoroughbred racing’s all-time leading trainer with 10,082 wins. None have come in the Kentucky Derby, where he is winless with 24 starters in 16 runnings.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – It is now accepted legend that Secretariat was a freak of nature, a beast of a racehorse whose name became synonymous with greatness.
But when Secretariat was loaded into post 10 for the 99th Kentucky Derby on May 5, 1973, at Churchill Downs, he was no sure thing to win – let alone go on and become the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years and an American sports icon for all time.
