ARCADIA, Calif. – Last spring, Hidinginplainsight took a liking to Santa Anita’s hillside turf course, winning a maiden race and finishing second in an allowance race on it. Those races may define how she is campaigned at the current winter-spring meeting.
Friday, Hidinginplainsight makes her second start after a seven-month layoff in an optional claimer over about 6 1/2 furlongs on the hillside turf course. A successful race could lead to more starts on the hillside course.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Chad Brown hasn’t started a lot of horses over Aqueduct’s inner track this winter, but those he has run have performed extremely well.
Expect more of the same Friday when Peggy Jane returns from an 11-month layoff in a second-level optional $35,000 claiming race for New York-bred fillies and mares going six furlongs.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Jockey Rajiv Maragh will miss at least another six weeks due to the slight fracture of his back he suffered in a spill at Aqueduct on Dec. 31.
According to his agent, Matt Muzikar, Maragh met with a neurosurgeon in New York on Tuesday and was advised not to do ride for at least four weeks. Maragh will meet again with his doctor at that time, and if he’s cleared to ride it would likely take another two weeks to get ready.
NEW ORLEANS – The Colonel E.R. Bradley Handicap and Marie Krantz Memorial Stakes, turf races that were to be run Saturday at the Fair Grounds, have been pushed back to Jan. 26 because of wet conditions.
It has been an unusually wet month in New Orleans. The last turf race run at the meet was the Dixie Poker Ace on Jan. 5. The track lost an entire card, on Jan. 10, because of heavy rain.
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – Brown Almighty is a two-turn stakes winner on turf and on Monday he will attempt to transfer his form to dirt when he makes his first main-track start in the $150,000 Smarty Jones at Oaklawn Park.
The Smarty Jones is the first of Oaklawn’s three preps for the Grade 1, $1 million Arkansas Derby. It will be run at a mile, and it highlights a special five-day race week.
Sign, the undefeated 3-year-old Pulpit filly, is off the Kentucky Oaks trail because of an injured hind ankle, trainer Al Stall said Tuesday.
Sign won her career debut at Saratoga by almost 12 lengths, then captured the Pocahontas Stakes in November at Churchill by four lengths in her most recent race. Stall said Sign had initially had had a bone bruise in the ankle diagnosed sometime after her last start, but the injury never improved in two months, and now Sign is scheduled to undergo surgery Friday in Kentucky to insert a stabilizing screw in the ankle.
Tour Guide and Mylute are two of the more advanced early season 3-year-olds stabled this winter in New Orleans, but only one of them, at most, will contest the Grade 3, $200,000 Lecomte Stakes on Saturday, the centerpiece of Fair Grounds’ Road to the Derby Kickoff Day program.
Mylute definitely will not start in the Lecomte, trainer Tom Amoss said. There’s nothing wrong with the colt, but Amoss and owner Gold Mark Farm are taking a more patient approach and pointing instead for the Risen Star Stakes on Feb. 23 at Fair Grounds.
Hot Fair Grounds starts have become old hat for trainer Andrew McKeever. McKeever got on an epic roll early in the 2010-2011 meet, and went well again at the start of 2011-2012. So far this meet, its déjà vu all over again – 6 wins from 15 starters.
Trainer Bernie Flint’s hot Fair Grounds start, however, has come out of the blue. Flint’s 23 runners this meet have produced 7 victories, a total it took his stable the entire 2011-2012 season to reach.
Jeranimo’s win in the Grade 2 San Gabriel Stakes on turf Sunday has left trainer Mike Pender and owner B.J. Wright with the long-term goal of starting the 7-year-old in the Arlington Million in August.
Jeranimo won his sixth stakes in the San Gabriel over 1 1/8 miles and is likely to appear in the $150,000 San Marcos Stakes over 1 1/4 miles on turf Feb. 9, Pender said.
Jeranimo won the San Gabriel in December 2010 and was second in the race in January 2012.
“With a little luck, he’d have swept the San Gabriel three years in a row,” Pender said.
ARCADIA, Calif. – One other-than, take two.
Eblouissante, Zenyatta’s half-sister and crushing maiden winner in her only start, resumes her career Thursday in a first-level allowance at Santa Anita, one month after she banged her hip on a receiving barn door at Betfair Hollywood Park and scratched 30 minutes out.
