Trainer Brendan Walsh won his first classic race when Pretty Mischievous captured the Kentucky Oaks last year, and when the filly Intricate launches her 3-year-old campaign Saturday at Fair Grounds, Walsh has good reason to hope she, too, can take him to the Oaks.
Two of the eight runners in Saturday’s $100,000 El Camino Real Derby at Golden Gate Fields are three-time winners.
First, there is Endlessly, the winner of two Grade 3 stakes on turf in Southern California last fall who will be a heavy favorite. A Kentucky-bred colt by Oscar Performance, Endlessly has earned $239,200 for owners and breeders John and Jerry Amerman.
Then there is Old Triangle, a California-bred gelding by the City Zip stallion Gig Harbor who races for owner and breeder Francis O’Leary and trainer Tim Bellasis. He has earned $39,390 in six starts.
Jockey Kylee Jordan will be sidelined through at least next Friday as she awaits more diagnostics on a shoulder she injured during a Feb. 2 race at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark.
Jordan dislocated her shoulder during the running of the fourth race, which she won aboard Sweet Mother Mary ($32.80). Following the race, family members took her to the emergency room. She was released that night, and is awaiting an MRI, agent Bobby Dean said Friday.
“She is feeling better,” he said. “We need to get an MRI before we go forward.”
Jack Steiner, one of the leading trainers in Northern California in recent years, is relocating to Santa Anita later this month.
Steiner said on Wednesday that he plans to bring a 10-horse team to Southern California, having reduced his stable from 40 since last fall. He currently has 17 horses in his care at Golden Gate Fields. Some of those horses will be sent to other trainers at Golden Gate Fields, while others will be shipped to Turf Paradise in Arizona, he said.
Led by the two-time Grade 3 winner Endlessly, Saturday’s $100,000 El Camino Real Derby at Golden Gate Fields is expected to have a small field.
This is the last running of the El Camino Real Derby before the track’s scheduled closure in June, and the second-to-last scheduled stakes. The Grade 3 San Francisco Mile, run on turf with a purse of $175,000, is April 27. The track’s final day is June 9.
Jerry Antonucci, a public handicapper for Los Angeles-area newspaper for nearly four decades, died on Tuesday of cancer, his friends said.
Antonucci was 77.
From 1973 until his retirement in 2010, Antonucci was a fixture on the front row of press boxes at Fairplex Park, Hollywood Park, and Santa Anita.
Antonucci did selections and wrote articles for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner from 1973 until that paper folded in the autumn of 1989. Antonucci moved to the Orange County Register shortly thereafter and remained with the paper until his retirement.
Stronghold was scratched from the Grade 3 Robert Lewis Stakes at Santa Anita last Saturday in favor of a scheduled start in the Grade 3 Sunland Park Derby on Feb. 18 in New Mexico.
Now, trainer Phil D’Amato needs the Southern California weather to cooperate in coming days to make the revised plan work.
Areas around Santa Anita, where Stronghold is based with D’Amato, sustained more than eight inches of rain from Saturday through late Tuesday, leaving the main track closed for activity from Sunday through Wednesday.
Dornoch, the Grade 2 Remsen winner, had his third work of the year Wednesday, breezing a half-mile in 49.10 seconds at the Palm Meadows training center in Florida. Dornoch, a full brother to 2023 Kentucky Derby winner Mage, is scheduled to make his 3-year-old debut in the Grade 2, $400,000 Fountain of Youth on March 2 at Gulfstream Park.
For the third straight time, Dornoch worked with the Barclay Tagg-trained turf maiden winner Marceau.
Second in the 2022 Kentucky Derby with Epicenter, who wound up champion 3-year-old, and fourth in the 2023 Derby with Disarm, trainer Steve Asmussen saw favored Carbone finish seventh last weekend in the Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn Park, one of four Derby preps on Feb. 3. One place in front of Carbone came the Asmussen-trained Otto the Conqueror.
The quarantine of Barn 15 at Belmont Park has been extended by two days to Feb. 26 after a horse stabled in that barn was diagnosed with a fever, the New York Racing Association and New York State Gaming Commission announced Tuesday night.
Willful Desire, a 4-year-old filly trained by Gustavo Rodriguez, developed a fever Monday. Nasal swabs and blood tests taken on the horse at Cornell were negative for equine herpesvirus (EHV), the NYRA said.
