Since the beginning of this decade, there have been 13 instances in which jockeys have won five or more Thoroughbred races at Del Mar, Los Alamitos, or Santa Anita.
Juan Hernandez has accounted for four of those milestones, including a five-win day at Santa Anita on Thursday.
Hernandez, 32, won the third race before prevailing in four consecutive races from the fifth through eighth. He previously had a five-win day at Del Mar on Dec. 1 and rode five winners at Santa Anita on Jan. 4.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Fluffy Socks, the five-time stakes winner and $1.3 million earner, will scratch from Saturday’s Grade 2, $500,000 Pegasus Filly and Mare Turf at Gulfstream Park due to an injury and will be retired, owner Sol Kumin said Friday.
Fluffy Socks was the 5-1 third choice on the morning line.
Kumin, who bred and owned this horse under Head of Plains Partners, said that trainer Chad Brown informed him Thursday that Fluffy Socks was off in her left hind leg. X-rays showed a faint line which could lead to a condylar fracture.
Del Mar will launch its 31-day summer meeting on Friday, July 18, returning to a three-day opening weekend after starting the 2024 summer meeting on a Saturday.
The track announced its racing calendar on Thursday, but it has yet to publish other details of the popular meeting, such as a stakes schedule, which is typically released in early spring.
Jockey Kazushi Kimura will miss the next four weeks of racing at Santa Anita because of a lower leg injury sustained in a starting gate incident on Jan. 16, according to his agent, Brian Beach.
“It’s a more severe injury than we thought,” Beach said on Thursday morning. “The doctors say it will be about a month or so.”
Kale’s Angel, the winner of two sprint stakes at Oaklawn Park since early December, is bound for California and a wintertime rest before resuming racing this spring.
“We’re going to bring him back for a little California sunshine,” trainer Peter Miller said on Wednesday.
Owned by Tom Kagele and Ernst Marchosky, Kale’s Angel won the $150,000 Advent Stakes at 5 1/2 furlongs for 2-year-olds at Oaklawn on Dec. 6 for his first stakes win.
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – Jockey Rafael Bejarano, who has the distinction of winning two runnings of the Southwest Stakes on a single day, will be chasing after his fourth victory in the race when he teams with Speed King on Saturday.
Bejarano first won the Southwest in 2012, when the race was split into divisions and he shipped in and accounted for both aboard Bob Baffert trainees Secret Circle and Castaway. Bejarano and Baffert returned a year later and won the Southwest with Super Ninety Nine.
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – Apprentice jockey Tyler Bacon will have the most significant mount of his career Saturday when he rides American Promise in the Grade 3, $1 million Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn Park.
And the 17-year-old is ready for the opportunity, according to American Promise’s trainer, D. Wayne Lukas.
“I started watching him here at Oaklawn and I was very impressed with him, what I saw on the racetrack, and equally impressed with the way he handles himself off the racetrack,” Lukas said. “He’s very articulate, very easy to deal with, listens very well.
Approximately 230 horses from the San Luis Rey Downs training center in northern San Diego County were temporarily relocated to Del Mar early Tuesday after evacuation orders were issued due to a wildfire in Bonsall, Calif.
The evacuation orders were lifted later on Tuesday, and horses were beginning to leave Del Mar to return to San Luis Rey Downs on Wednesday, according to Tom Robbins, Del Mar's executive vice president of racing.
Most racetrack souvenirs do not require a multi-state delivery via flatbed truck and installation by a team of five men.
Then again, what former Northern California horse owner Maureen Richardson took home from a Golden Gate Fields memorabilia auction last year, a few months after the track’s permanent closure in June, is far from the norm.
Richardson bought the sixteenth pole – the marker that indicated there was 110 yards to the finish. She had it extracted from its trackside position and shipped 10 hours to her home in Sandy, Utah.
