ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Four of the six horses in Friday’s Woodbine headliner are stakes winners, including 2009 Queen’s Plate winner Eye of the Leopard, who will switch from turf to Polytrack in the 1 1/16-mile allowance prep for the Durham Cup Stakes.
ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Hollywood Hit, Canada’s champion sprinter of 2010, is ineligible to race in Ontario for a period of 90 days, Sept. 15 through Dec. 13, after testing positive for the Class 3 drug acepromazine, a tranquilizer.
Trained by Terry Jordan for owner Peter Redekop, Hollywood Hit had been an impressive winner of a six-furlong allowance race here at Woodbine on Sept. 7, earning a Beyer Speed Figure of 104 for his 1:08.30 clocking, which was just a tick off the 1:08.16 track record.
There is little in the way of stakes racing these days at Fairmount Park in downstate Illinois, and on a rare stakes-filled day of racing there was little in the way of predictability. River Bear, who tallied sharply in the Tex's Zing, was the only winning favorite among six $50,000 Illinois-bred stakes Tuesday at Fairmount.
Diamond Joe ranks as the winningest horse in North America after making it nine in a row in a Friday night allowance at Remington. He bounced out of the race in good shape and is to make his next start in the $400,000 Oklahoma Derby on Sept. 30, trainer Chuck Turco said Tuesday.
Diamond Joe earned a career-high Beyer Speed Figure of 78 for his win in the allowance, a one-mile race run on a muddy main track. It was the horse’s first start outside of Nebraska. He arrived at Remington last Tuesday.
Category Seven, a Louisiana Downs regular who between 2009 and 2011 won six stakes races, is due to have a foal by English Channel next March or April, said her longtime trainer, Kenny Hargrave.
“We sure miss her,” Hargrave said.
Alternation on Tuesday morning put in a significant work for the Grade 2, $500,000 Hawthorne Gold Cup, the Oct. 6 race in Chicago that will serve as his stepping-stone to the $5 million Breeders’ Cup Classic at Santa Anita on Nov. 3.
Alternation worked at his Remington Park base in Oklahoma City at 6 a.m., trainer Donnie Von Hemel said. The horse went five furlongs in 1:01.71 under regular rider Luis Quinonez and galloped out six furlongs in 1:13.72.
POMONA, Calif. – Trainer Pete Eurton and the gelding Liberty Cap are racking up travel miles this week, flying from all over the world for a marathon Thursday at Fairplex Park.
Eurton was vacationing in Italy early this week. Liberty Cap was stabled in Florida. They meet Thursday in the paddock at Fairplex, where Liberty Cap makes his first California start in race 7, a 1 3/8-mile starter allowance that precedes the race-8 feature.
The San Joaquin County Fair in Stockton gave the 2011 Northern California fair season quite a kick start last year when it attracted more betting in four days than it had during a five-day meet the previous year. Fair officials hope the Stockton meet will give the fair season a late boost in its new slot as the year’s second-to-last fair meet.
Stockton begins a two-week, eight-day run Thursday. Last year, the Stockton meet ran for one week in June. After the Stockton meet ends Sept. 30, the Big Fresno Fair will end the fair season with a meet that runs from Oct. 4-14.
ELMONT, N.Y. – With hopes of making it next to the Breeders’ Cup Ladies’ Classic, the undefeated champion Awesome Feather returns to the races off an eight-month layoff Thursday in the $85,000 Nasty Storm Stakes at Belmont Park.
Awesome Feather, who was the champion 2-year-old filly of 2010, will be making just her fourth start since winning the 2010 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies in the Nasty Storm, a one-mile race that goes as the third on Belmont’s nine-race card.
