OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Arctic Arrogance, second to Hit Show in the Grade 3 Withers Stakes, will be pointed to the Grade 3, $300,000 Gotham Stakes on March 4, trainer Linda Rice said Wednesday.
Rice said neither the three weeks back to the Gotham nor the eight weeks to the Grade 2 Wood Memorial is ideal, but that she didn’t want to wait two months to run the horse back.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Jockey Trevor McCarthy, injured in a spill on Nov. 18 at Aqueduct, got back on horses Tuesday morning for the first time in nearly three months and is targeting a March 3 return.
McCarthy suffered a fractured collarbone and a pelvic injury when he went down during the running of the sixth race on Nov. 18. On Tuesday, he jogged three horses and galloped one over the Belmont Park training track. On Wednesday, he galloped three horses and jogged one.
The well-bred Wadsworth has hit his stride at Turfway Park, with a Saturday night allowance-level score his second straight win on the Tapeta. Trainer Brad Cox said he and owner-breeder Godolphin are “definitely considering” Turfway’s upcoming Kentucky Derby points races for the gelding.
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Hit Show, the Grade 3 Withers winner, hit the road Wednesday and will do his training at Fair Grounds for his next start, which is still likely to occur in the Grade 2, $750,000 Wood Memorial on April 8 at Aqueduct.
Dustin Dugas, the Belmont Park-based assistant to trainer Brad Cox, said owner Gary West expressed a preference not to stay in New York for the next two months and train over the deep Belmont training track.
Hit Show was stabled at Oaklawn Park before shipping to New York for the Withers, which he won by 5 1/2 lengths.
NEW ORLEANS – By the time you read this, Steve Asmussen might have sent out his 10,000th North American winner. No one ever has done this, obviously, as Asmussen, 57, is the all-time North American leader in training wins, 9,997 through Tuesday.
Among active trainers, Jerry Hollendorfer, 76, has the next-highest total, 7,757. Todd Pletcher, who is 55, has roughly half the number of Asmussen wins, while 87-year-old D. Wayne Lukas is closing on 5,000 career winners. In other words, it’s not even close.
It’s not out of the question that the best nine- to 10-furlong turf horse in North America races Saturday at Fair Grounds. Maybe you don’t think that highly of Two Emmys. Maybe his record merits a closer look.
In March 2021, Two Emmys made his stakes debut in the Grade 2 Muniz Memorial, Fair Grounds’s most important turf race, where he set the pace and held a strong second behind Colonel Liam. Colonel Liam was coming off a win in the Grade 1 Pegasus World Cup Turf and would go on to dead-heat for first in the Grade 1 Turf Classic at Churchill Downs.
ARCADIA, Calif. – Newgrange, who won his 4-year-old debut in the Grade 2 San Pasqual Stakes on Jan. 28, is on schedule for the Grade 1 Santa Anita Handicap on March 4.
Trainer Phil D’Amato said over the weekend that the $500,000 Santa Anita Handicap at 1 1/4 miles is a preferred goal with the hope that Newgrange can play a role in the national older horse division as the year progresses.
“We’d like to continue to develop him and make a Breeders’ Cup horse out of him,” D’Amato said. “He will need to keep developing.”
According to the betting public participating in Pool 4 of the Kentucky Derby Future Wager, which closed Sunday night, trainer Tom Amoss’s best hope for the 2023 Derby runs not in the Risen Star Stakes on Saturday at Fair Grounds but in the filly-restricted Rachel Alexandra.
Hoosier Philly, the unbeaten 3-year-old filly trained by Amoss, makes her season’s debut in the Rachel Alexandra after attracting surprising support in the latest future pool, where she closed at 11-1. Only champion 2-year-old male Forte at 8-1 was a shorter price among individual horses.
Cave Rock, one of the nation’s leading 2-year-olds of 2022, has resumed workouts for the first time since a second-place finish in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Keeneland in November.
On Monday at Santa Anita, Cave Rock worked a half-mile in 47.80 seconds.
“He went nice and easy,” trainer Bob Baffert said. “He wanted to do more.”
OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Jockey Jose Gomez, the Eclipse Award-winning apprentice jockey of 2022, officially became a journeyman rider on Sunday. He went 0 for 5 with two seconds at Aqueduct.
On Saturday, his final day as an apprentice, Gomez won the $97,000 Jimmy Winkfield Stakes aboard Drew’s Gold for his third stakes win and 171st career win.
Gomez, who sits sixth in the Aqueduct winter meet standings with 15 wins, expressed confidence that he will continue to succeed even without the five-pound weight allowance.
