Too Much Kiki, who is the reigning Texas-bred of the year, may have opened a new career chapter for herself last month with her runner-up finish in the $100,000 Memorial Day Sprint at Lone Star Park.
She finished two lengths behind winner Mystic Lake, a multiple Grade 2 winner and earner of more than $1 million who could make her next start at Saratoga in the Honorable Miss.
Mister Omaha is on pace for a start in the $250,000 Iowa Derby next month at Prairie Meadows after the multiple stakes winner turned in a strong recent work at his base of Lone Star Park. The 1 1/16-mile stakes is July 5.
“That’s our plan if everything goes good between now and then,” said Joe Offolter, who trains Mister Omaha for his breeder, Bryan Hawk.
Mister Omaha breezed a half-mile in 50 seconds last Sunday and from there galloped out a mile in 1:40 and change, Offolter said. Jockey Luis Quinonez, who has the mount in the Iowa Derby, was aboard Mister Omaha.
For the second time this year, average daily handle on Santa Anita’s races increased compared to a similar period a year ago.
At the 29-day spring meeting that ended on Sunday, handle on races run at Santa Anita increased 4.8 percent from more than $228.6 million in 2024 to more than $239.6 million this year, according to figures compiled by Daily Racing Form.
Four stakes races on the Friday card at Penn National, including the Grade 3, $400,000 Penn Mile, will be postponed a second time and will now be run on Friday, June 27. There will be no turf racing at the track this week due to heavy rain throughout the week.
The original 11 races scheduled at the track for Friday were to include the Penn Mile, $150,000 Penn Oaks, and two $75,000 statebred races, the Alphabet Soup and the Lyphard.
The 5-year-old horse Rebel Red has been through some stuff. He lost an eye in a stall accident last summer at Saratoga. He clipped heels and fell during the Louisville Stakes last month. Yet Rebel Red has come through it all better than ever – on the Beyer Speed Figure scale, at least.
In a span of eight days trainer Brad Cox watched both his unbeaten 3-year-old fillies go down to defeat.
Good Cheer, the Kentucky Oaks winner, won her first seven before finishing a flat fifth June 6 in the Acorn Stakes at Saratoga. Cox can’t point to anything particular besides a sloppy track that produced that dull showing.
For the third time in as many months, supporters of Northern California fair racing will request dates from the California Horse Racing Board on Thursday for brief meetings in Fresno and Ferndale in September and October.
In April, the racing board voted 3-2 against a proposal for late summer dates at Ferndale, but it needed four votes for an official action. With the full seven-person board in place for the May meeting, the board rejected Ferndale’s request by a vote of 4-3.
ARCADIA, Calif. – A spring of career landmarks continued for Umberto Rispoli Sunday at Santa Anita, where the jockey notched a six-win day on the final program of the track’s spring meeting.
Last month, Rispoli won his first American classic with Journalism in the Grade 1 Preakness Stakes at Pimlico. Sunday was Rispoli’s most successful single day of riding since he relocated from Hong Kong in December 2019.
ARCADIA, Calif. – Sharp wins on Saturday at Santa Anita by the 3-year-old filly Thought Process in an allowance and the veteran gelding Motorious in the Grade 3 Daytona Stakes for turf sprinters have put the multiple stakes winners on course for stakes at the Del Mar summer meeting.
ARCADIA, Calif. – It was fitting that trainer Doug O’Neill reached his 3,000th Thoroughbred win in North America in Sunday’s eighth race at Santa Anita with a colt owned and bred by Paul and Zillah Reddam.
O’Neill, 57, has won two Kentucky Derbys for the Reddams – with I’ll Have Another in 2012 and Nyquist in 2016.
“I’m so glad we were able to get our 3,000th for them,” O’Neill said in the winner’s circle.
