Hunt, the Grade 1 winner occasionally ranked as the top middle-distance turf horse in California, will skip the Grade 2 Seabiscuit Handicap on Saturday at Del Mar after missing a month of serious training. Hunt was the 122-pound highweight for the Seabiscuit, a race he won in 2017.
“We’re going to wait,” trainer Phil D’Amato said this week. “To win these kinds of races, you have to be 100 percent, you can’t be 90 percent. We’re erring on the side of caution.”
ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Starship Jubilee, last year’s Canadian champion female grass runner, was a $425,000 buy-back from the Keeneland November sale, but trainer Kevin Attard said she was sold privately after going through the ring to Blue Heaven Farm in Kentucky.
“We’ve got her training in Kentucky right now, possibly heading to the Claiming Crown,” Attard said. “If all goes well, she’ll be having a 2019 campaign as well.”
Hotshot Anna, the best older female synthetic-surface sprinter in North America this year, has rejoined trainer Hugh Robertson’s barn after being freshened following her decisive win Sept. 17 in the $400,000 Presque Isle Masters.
“I picked her up when I came down to Fair Grounds,” Robertson said Sunday. “She’s been training for eight or 10 days now. We’ll run her here in one of those 5 ½-furlong grass stakes and she how she does with that.”
Monte Man won his seventh straight race when he captured the $50,000 Heitai Stakes at Fair Grounds on Saturday. It looked like a perfect prep for the $100,000 Louisiana Champions Day Sprint on Dec. 8, and trainer Ron Faucheux saw it that way, too.
“He’s good and happy today,” Faucheux said Tuesday. “He’s very fresh coming out of the race. It worked out perfect.”
Miguel Mena was leading rider at the 2017-2018 Fair Grounds meet when a horse leading the eighth race on March 15 broke down badly. Mena’s trailing mount hit the stricken horse and down went Mena, breaking his right heel and ankle.
The timetable for Mena’s return initially was estimated at six months, but it took Mena nearly eight to ride in a race again. He returned to action Oct. 25 at Churchill, rode 18 races at the meet there, and then headed back to New Orleans for the start of the 2018-2019 meet.
Smokin Nitro, the ninth-place finisher in the $250,000 Steel Valley Sprint at Mahoning Valley Race Course on Monday, in all likelihood should have been declared a non-starter after only one of the gate doors to his stall in the starting gate opened.
Consistently fast, Smokin Nitro broke slowly, several lengths behind all but one runner in the 11-horse field. He never reached serious contention and was beaten 12 1/2 lengths as the 8-1 fifth choice in the betting.
Michael G. Ziegler, a veteran jockey and exercise rider, died last week in Oklahoma of an apparent suicide. Ziegler was 52.
Ziegler’s body was discovered by his wife, Jackie, on Nov. 13 after she found a note Ziegler had written, according to trainer Francisco Bravo, for whom Ziegler was galloping horses.
Bravo said Ziegler came to work and galloped during regular training Monday at Remington Park and showed no outward signs of distress. Tuesday, cold weather delayed morning training and Ziegler texted Bravo’s assistant to say he was “sick” and “felt like hell.”
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – With temperatures not expected to reach 30 degrees on Thursday, it is uncertain whether the Aqueduct turf courses will be in use. If they are, they will host two stakes races on the nine-race Thanksgiving Day card.
The $150,000 Winter Memories, for 3-year-old fillies, drew a solid field of 11 for the turf plus one main-track-only entrant. The $100,000 Central Park, a new race for juveniles, drew a field of seven. Both are scheduled for 1 1/16 miles.
ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Yorkton captured the first graded stakes win of his career in the Grade 3 Bold Venture Stakes at Woodbine on Sept. 15. He nearly made it two in a row next time out, finishing within a neck of winner Hembree in the Grade 2 Nearctic Stakes on Oct. 13. He’ll get a chance to make amends Saturday when he starts in the Grade 2 Kennedy Road Stakes over seven furlongs on Tapeta.
