ARCADIA, Calif. – Gorgeous Ginny became 2017’s first juvenile winner in Southern California with a victory in a maiden race for California-bred fillies at Santa Anita on Thursday.
Because of a lack of stakes for 2-year-olds in late spring, Gorgeous Ginny’s career will not resume until July. The gap in races is not an issue for trainer Robertino Diodoro.
ARCADIA, Calif. – Regardless of the outcome of Sunday’s Grade 3 Adoration Stakes at Santa Anita, two champions are lurking behind the scenes for the next race in California’s older-female division, the Grade 1 Beholder Mile on June 3.
Songbird, the champion 2-year-old filly of 2015 and champion 3-year-old filly of 2016, worked five furlongs Thursday from the gate in 1:03.80. The $400,000 Beholder Mile is scheduled to be her first start since a second to the champion Beholder in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff last November.
Trainer Linda Rice said Matt King Coal came out of his runner-up finish in the $1.25 million Charles Town Classic well and that she is considering two races for his next start.
“We were thinking about the Pimlico Special as a next race, but we might give him more time than that,” Rice said. “It’s more likely we go to the Suburban, with a race before to get him there.”
The $300,000 Pimlico Special, a 1 3/16-mile race, will be run May 19, a day before the Preakness. The Grade 2, $750,000 Suburban is a 1 1/4-mile race at Belmont on July 8.
As always, there are overlays and underlays for bettors who took a shot in any of the four pools in the 2017 Kentucky Derby Future Wager.
Perhaps the best bargain came in Pool 3, when Always Dreaming closed at 42-1. The colt likely will be no worse than the third choice Saturday.
Another likely favorite, Irish War Cry, was 26-1, 26-1, 7-1, and 21-1 in the four pools. The 7-1 came after he won the Holy Bull, and the 21-1 came after he ran poorly in the Fountain of Youth (and before he rebounded in the Wood Memorial).
New York racing’s landscape is about to undergo a significant change.
The New York Racing Association will remove the inner track at Aqueduct and replace it with a second turf course. Further, the main dirt track will be renovated to allow winter racing on it.
The project to remove the inner track began this week – shortly after the Aqueduct backstretch was closed for training for the summer – and should be completed by the time Aqueduct reopens for training in September, and certainly by the time racing returns in November.
The Louisiana Downs meet that opens Saturday features a slew of changes, including moving the Super Derby to turf, a restructured race week, and new wagers. The 84-date season in Bossier City will run through Sept. 27.
Louisiana Downs, which operates a slots casino, also is expanding its racing-related events with a qualifier for the National Handicapping Championship. It will offer two spots in the Las Vegas finale during an ontrack tournament June 17.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – About 1,900 horses reside on the backstretch at Churchill Downs. Every morning, they are groomed, tacked up, and led to the racetrack, where they jog, gallop, or breeze, and then return to their stable.
For a racetracker, the process hardly could look more commonplace. Yet every time the father-and-son training team of Mark and Norman Casse sees a relatively plain-looking bay horse with a white blaze accomplish this mundane task, it eases their minds.
ELMONT, N.Y. – Trainer Graham Motion and jockey Rajiv Maragh have become very close friends over the last few years. It did not have to turn out that way.
In 2011, Motion won the Kentucky Derby with Animal Kingdom, and Maragh finished third on Mucho Macho Man. It was an incident in that year’s Belmont Stakes that could have ended this friendship before it began.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – It was an early-spring morning at Keeneland in 1989 when one of Carl Nafzger’s horses came galloping by, with his newly hired exercise rider impressing the trainer.
“Sharon,” he said, turning to his assistant, Sharon Peters, “don’t let that Australian boy out of my sight.”
Isabelle de Tomaso says her favorite racecar was a red OSCA 750S. De Tomaso is still fond of horsepower that comes in a red package, only now it has four hooves instead of four tires.
A New Jersey homebred, the chestnut colt Irish War Cry is revving up for the Kentucky Derby for de Tomaso, whose father was the late Amory L. Haskell, the first president and chairman of the Monmouth Park Jockey Club and the namesake of its signature race.
