Louisiana Downs will have a different announcer for the final two weeks of its meet as John McGary begins calling races at Zia Park in Hobbs, N.M., on Saturday. McGary said Mike Persichino will fill in through the close of the Louisiana Downs meet on Sept. 27.
McGary will call at Zia through the close of the meet in December, then be back at Louisiana Downs for both the Quarter Horse and Thoroughbred meets in 2018.
Trainer Brad Cox had a stakes triple at Louisiana Downs on Saturday, and his three winners, led by Super Derby hero Mr. Misunderstood, were back home at Churchill Downs by Sunday. There are varying plans going forward for the horses.
Mr. Misunderstood improved his turf record to 5 for 5 in the $200,000 Super Derby, which was run on the grass for the first time in its 38 runnings. He sat just off a pedestrian pace under Chris Rosier and darted home by three lengths in the 1 1/16-mile race. Mr. Misunderstood equalled his best Beyer Speed Figure, an 89.
Apprentice rider Johan Rosado won at Parx Racing on Sunday with his first career mount. Rosado’s father, Roberto, a mainstay in the Parx riding colony for 20 years, finished sixth in the same race.
Johan Rosado, 19, rallied Tripocha up the rail in the stretch of race 2 to win by a neck for trainer Scott Lake. Tripocha paid $4.40.
Rosado’s victory triggered an emotional winner’s circle celebration, which attracted a large crowd, including his mother and father.
Monmouth Park track announcer Frank Mirahmadi, who has had two surgeries for colon cancer in the past year, aced his latest round of tests at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, and has been pronounced cancer-free.
Scans and other tests revealed no evidence of the disease. Mirahmadi is scheduled to undergo blood tests in March and have another round of scans in a year.
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – Trainer Chris Block and owner Bob Lothenbach had a first and a second in Arlington stakes Saturday, with Bet She Wins taking the Arlington-Washington Lassie and Captivating Moon running second in the Arlington-Washington Futurity.
Trainer Horacio de Paz and Kevin Plank’s Sagamore Farm also had a first and a second in stakes on Saturday.
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – The Arlington-Washington Lassie lost its graded status in 2013 and now is merely a listed stakes worth $75,000, barely more than half the purse of a maiden race at Kentucky Downs.
Don’t bother telling that to Bet She Wins.
Bet She Wins powered home to a 9 1/2-length victory Saturday in the Lassie, and her winning time of 1:24.43 for seven furlongs over a slow-playing Polytrack produced a Beyer Speed Figure of 90. That’s the second-highest figure for a 2-year-old of either sex on any surface so far this year.
Handle at the Monmouth Park meeting that concluded Sunday showed a narrow gain in the all-sources daily average over the 2016 meeting, according to figures released by the track.
Handle at the 50-day meet averaged $3.47 million per day, up just less than 1 percent from the $3.44 million a year ago. Ontrack handle increased 7.9 percent to $424,556 a day, while money bet offtrack was up slightly to $3.05 million per day.
Total handle for the season decreased by approximately 11.5 percent, since the 2016 meet consisted of seven additional racing days.
Even with just four of five dates in the books, Kentucky Downs already has surpassed its all-time all-sources handle for a meet.
Aggregate handle into the Thursday finale stands at $24,567,471, eclipsing the $22.5 million that was bet last year over five days. Even more impressive is that the 2017 meet will include just one Saturday of racing versus two in 2016.
The top two days in track history came last weekend when nearly $8.5 million was bet Saturday and a little more than $6 million Sunday.
Maker, Leparoux top standings
More than six years later, Hogy and jockey Florent Geroux are still a winning team.
Geroux was aboard Hogy when the then-2-year-old gelding easily won his debut on June 11, 2011, in the last race at Arlington Park. Geroux, whose career arc was just then starting to climb, can still recall how exciting it was when Hogy won his first three starts, including an ungraded stakes at Canterbury Park.
“He was always a good horse,” said Geroux, who has become a perennial top-10 rider in North America.
