BALTIMORE – First Mission, the 5-2 second choice on the morning line for Saturday's $1.65 million Preakness Stakes at Pimlico, will scratch from the race due to a yet-to-be-determined issue with his left hind ankle, his connections announced Friday morning.
Mage won the Kentucky Derby in his fourth career start for a four-pronged partnership. The Preakness Stakes favorite races for OGMA Investments, a partnership helmed by trainer Gustavo Delgado’s son and assistant Gustavo Delgado Jr.; bloodstock agent Ramiro Restrepo; Sam Herzberg’s Sterling Racing; and Commonwealth, a sports investment app offering micro-shares in racehorses.
A Little League baseball game played in a park in Garden City, N.Y., three days before the Kentucky Derby may have foreshadowed what lay ahead for jockey Javier Castellano on the first Saturday in May.
Bottom of the sixth – the last inning – in a 0-0 game, 10-year-old Brady Castellano, Javier’s son, gets his first hit of the season. Steals second. Steals third. Next batter hits a ground ball to second and Castellano beats the throw home, sliding in safely to score the game-winning run.
A celebration ensues.
BALTIMORE – Every spring, hard on the third Saturday in May, racing scribes fire up “new shooters” pieces, stories about horses who skipped the Kentucky Derby and ran in the Preakness Stakes.
The main story this year concerns not a new shooter but a lone soldier, Mage, the only horse among eight Preakness entrants racing in the second leg of the Triple Crown after contesting the first.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. - Turf racing at Gulfstream Park will end for the season after the May 28 program, two weeks earlier than originally scheduled. Live racing is also being scaled back from four to three cards a week beginning June 2.
Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore has added eight pick five bets to its wagering menus for the Friday and Saturday cards this week, hoping to leverage the low-takeout bets into substantial handle gains for the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes and Preakness cards.
Two of the new pick five bets will link races on the Friday card to races on the Saturday card, with both ending in the Preakness, which is scheduled as the 13th race on a 14-race card. Both also include the Black-Eyed Susan Stakes.
A new trainer has not yet been named for 2022 Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike, but owner Rick Dawson indicated that he plans for the colt to remain based in Kentucky.
Dawson wrote on his Facebook page that his horses were moved on Saturday from former trainer Eric Reed’s Mercury Equine Center in Lexington to Blackwood Stables in Versailles, on the other side of town. Blackwood, a full breaking, training, and lay-up facility, has a six-furlong dirt track and a turf course and is accredited for public official workouts.
Smile Happy and Played Hard, both of whom scored major victories on the first weekend in May, are among those expected to line up for another marquee card at Churchill Downs on the first weekend of July.
Trainer Kenny McPeek confirmed that Smile Happy is pointing to the Grade 1, $1 million Stephen Foster on July 1, a race that will award its winner a berth in the Breeders’ Cup Classic this November at Santa Anita.
Golden Gate Fields will operate an 18-day late summer and autumn meeting on a Saturday-through-Monday basis this year, eliminating racing on Fridays during the six-week season that begins Aug. 26.
General manager David Duggan said Sunday that a move to Monday racing will be an attempt to boost handle for the Northern California track on a day in which few tracks operate after Labor Day.
“Until we try to change things a little bit, we won’t be moving the needle,” Duggan said.
