HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Wednesday’s main event is for 2-year-old fillies going a mile under optional-claiming conditions. The fourth race, it lured a field of 10 led by Smart Shopping, who rallied going seven furlongs over a sloppy track at Churchill Downs on Nov. 28 to win her only start.
Robby Albarado, who guided Smart Shopping to victory for trainer Brendan Walsh, will fly in to ride the daughter of Smart Strike on Wednesday.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Trainer Eddie Plesa Jr. readily admits that 2015 was a bad year as far as he was concerned. He also called it the luckiest year of his life.
Those who know Plesa well understand exactly what he means.
Plesa has won just 37 races in 2015, his lowest yearly total since 1984. He also started fewer horses this season, 267, than he had in each of the past 30 years. Serious health issues kept Plesa from duplicating the kind of success he’s enjoyed on a regular basis since taking out his trainer’s license in the early 1980s.
OLDSMAR, Fla. – A globetrotting star could be coming to Tampa Bay Downs for the $100,000 Turf Dash, a five-furlong turf sprint for 4-year-olds and up Jan. 9. Mongolian Saturday, who won the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint at 15-1 on Oct. 31 at Keeneland, was among 29 nominees to the Turf Dash, and if he works well this weekend, he likely will show up, according to his connections.
ARCADIA, Calif. – More than eight weeks have passed since American Pharoah left trainer Bob Baffert’s stable for good, bound for Ashford Stud in Kentucky.
“It is a different life,” Baffert said last weekend. “We’re in the A.P. life – After Pharoah.”
In some ways, everything has changed for Baffert and his team at Santa Anita. Gone are the crowds of well-wishers who watched American Pharoah’s workouts and visited the barn to catch a glimpse of the Triple Crown star.
ARCADIA, Calif. – Santa Anita began its winter-spring meeting on Saturday with strong attendance and handle figures compared with the corresponding day in 2014.
The opening day saw the first use of the track’s refurbished turf course, which was well received by jockeys despite some concern about how the course will respond to use in the coming months.
Saturday’s announced ontrack crowd of 44,873 was the highest for an opening day since 46,904 attended the 1994 opening. This was the first opening day on a Saturday since 2009, when 35,667 were in attendance.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Blane Servis didn’t accompany his father to Aqueduct on Jan. 3, 2004, when the John Servis-trained Smarty Jones won the Count Fleet Stakes, kicking off a 3-year-old campaign that would include victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness but a kick-in-the-gut one-length defeat in the Belmont Stakes.
Back then, there were other things more appealing for a 16-year-old kid to do than spend a day at the Big A.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – The freakishly fast but frequently fragile Mean Season is nearing a return to the races.
Mean Season, a son of Henny Hughes entering his 6-year-old season, blitzed four furlongs in 46.69 seconds Sunday over the training track at Belmont Park, his first local work after five breezes at the Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Matt King Coal, an impressive maiden winner at Belmont in October, will be forced to skip Saturday’s Grade 3, $200,000 Jerome Stakes after getting sick for the second time in a month.
Trainer Linda Rice said Matt King Coal spiked a fever shortly after getting over a respiratory infection. Rice said she sent the horse to Patty Hogan’s farm in Cream Ridge, N.J., for a four- to six-week vacation.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Jan’s Reserve, the dominant winner of the King’s Swan Stakes over Aqueduct’s main track Nov. 27, topped a field of seven entered for Friday’s inaugural running of the $125,000 Lost in the Fog Stakes for 3-year-old sprinters over the inner track.
The Lost in the Fog is the first of four sprints for 3-year-olds offered at Aqueduct during the winter-spring season, culminating April 9 with the Grade 3, $300,000 Bay Shore.
Jockey Pedro Flores suffered a crack in his first thoracic vertebra (T1) when his mount, On Time Cat, broke down and fell on the far turn in Sunday’s third race at Golden Gate Fields.
Flores was taken to Highland Hospital in Oakland and was to remain overnight for observation. A CT scan on his head proved negative.
On Time Cat suffered a fractured left front cannon bone and had to be euthanized.
