Since this holiday weekend’s two best and richest races are Monday at Oaklawn Park – the Razorback Handicap and the Southwest Stakes, both Grade 3, $500,000 events – it seems like a timely idea to use this Sunday platform for a Weekend Warrior-like look at these two races. So here goes:
RAZORBACK HANDICAP
There is a lot to like about McCraken. He impressed when he looped his field from well off the pace to win the Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes last fall and complete a 3-for-3 juvenile campaign. And he caught the eye again Saturday with a successful 3-year-old bow in the Sam F. Davis Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs.
Arrogate will not be running in the U.S. for a while, unless some American racetrack is willing to go into hock to compete with the $6 million he ran for in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, or the $12 million he ran for in the Pegasus World Cup, or the $10 million he might run for in the Dubai World Cup next month.
Songbird’s 2017 debut gives the game hope, although Jerry Hollendorfer is keeping his cards close when it comes to her next start, as he admires the way she has matured as a newly turned 4-year-old.
Ask Drayden Van Dyke about the last quarter-mile of the fourth race at Santa Anita on Jan. 26, and he probably would answer with something like: “Drayden who?”
It’s just as well that he can’t remember. Van Dyke was riding the 3-year-old filly Tawny, making only her third start after a smart maiden win at Los Alamitos in December. While leading the field nearing the quarter pole, Tawny’s left front ankle gave way. Physical instinct threw her weight to the right, and her foreleg fractured.
You’ve got to hand it to the French. The powers of horse racing in the land that gave us Napoleon, Sartre, and “Barbarella” have outdone themselves this time.
The recent decree that female jockeys should have a two-kilogram break in the weights – or about 4.5 pounds – when riding against their male counterparts was at first greeted with an appreciative nod at the lengths to which they would go for a good laugh. I mean, French cineastes pretended for years that they loved Jerry Lewis movies, and the gullible Americans swallowed it whole.
You might think that since all three of Saturday’s Kentucky Derby point prep races were won in decisive fashion, the Derby picture right now on Sunday morning is at least just a tiny bit clearer. But that is anything but the case.
Instead of clarity, the road to the Derby Saturday veered sharply off the path and straight into some very tall weeds. And that is because of Classic Empire’s shockingly empty performance in the Holy Bull at Gulfstream.
Champagne Room is a Breeders’ Cup winner and Eclipse Award champion, and yet the prerace chatter around Sunday’s Grade 2 Las Virgenes Stakes at Santa Anita would lead anyone to believe that she is Daniel heading for the lion’s den, David going up against Goliath, or Jonah about to be swallowed by the whale.
Thus endeth my supply of Old Testament allusions.
The Rachel Alexandra-Zenyatta rivalry never happened. Beholder and Songbird delivered only one memorable dance. And that rematch between titans Arrogate and California Chrome fizzled in the Florida sun.
Time to go back to those old reliables – Hoppertunity and Hard Aces.
Sometime around 7 p.m. last Saturday, Raul Rodriguez was informed that he had won the $100 prize for the groom with the best-turned-out horse in the paddock for the $12 million Pegasus World Cup.
“Oh, yeah?” Rodriguez said, looking up from his work. “That’s good.”
Look, I am as surprised and as disappointed as anyone that the California Chrome we all had come to know and respect failed to show up in Saturday’s Pegasus World Cup at Gulfstream, whether due to the balky knee discovered post race or not. His ninth-place finish was a deflating way for a tremendous race horse to conclude a stellar career.
At the same time, Arrogate’s tour de force in the Pegasus was not at all a surprise, because Arrogate showed when he caught California Chrome to win the Breeders’ Cup Classic last November that he was the better horse.
