LEXINGTON, Ky. – Comedero had to scratch as the morning-line favorite from the $75,000 Hot Springs Stakes three weeks ago at Oaklawn Park after coming down with a mild fever. It’s just as well, since the alternative became the $175,000 Commonwealth Stakes, a Grade 2 race with more than double the purse and one in which the Arkansas-bred speedster looks like a dominant front-runner.

“This looked like a race where he could be lonely on the front end,” said Mike Stidham, who trains Comedero for Peter Redekop. “He’s got real sprint speed.”

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Hessonite, a multiple stakes winner among New York-bred company in her 3-year-old season, kicks off her 4-year-old campaign in an open-company overnight stakes Saturday at Aqueduct.

Hessonite is one of eight fillies and mares entered in the $75,000 Videogenic, a 1 1/16-mile race that appears to serve as a prep for the Grade 3, $150,000 Beaugay at Belmont Park on May 5.

Hessonite, a daughter of Freud trained by David Donk, went 4 for 6 last year, capped by a 1 1/4-length victory in the $125,000 Ticonderoga at Belmont on New York Showcase Day.

ARCADIA, Calif. – Jockey Patrick Valenzuela’s retirement apparently lasted four months.

Thursday, Valenzuela said is planning a return to riding at the Hollywood Park spring-summer meeting that begins on April 26.

Valenzuela, 49, has not ridden since Nov. 13 at Hollywood Park. He announced his retirement a month later, but said on Thursday he is ready for a comeback.

“I’m going to give it my best shot,” Valenzuela said. “I feel healthy. I’ve been running and I feel really good.

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – Apriority’s mission is clear Saturday in the Grade 3, $250,000 Count Fleet Sprint Handicap at Oaklawn Park. He will have to catch the win-streaking mare Izzy Rules, if he is to deliver as the 118-pound starting highweight.

The Count Fleet, a six-furlong race that drew six older horses, is the first of four stakes that will be run consecutively on the closing-day card. The program has a special first post of noon Central.

AUBURN, Wash. – Saturday’s feature race at Emerald Downs, a 5 1/2-furlong sprint for $15,000 claimers, attracted an evenly matched field of nine older sprinters. Olympic Lights, who has 12 career Emerald victories, figures to be a popular favorite, but with most of the runners coming off extended layoffs, it could be tricky for handicappers to zero in on the winner. The feature is the seventh of eight races on a program that begins at 2 p.m. Pacific.

MIAMI – Trainer Phil Gleaves is hoping a week that started on the lowest of low notes will end on a high one when he sends out Csaba as the likely favorite in Saturday’s $150,000 Calder Derby. A fixture on the local stakes schedule for nearly 40 years, the 1 1/8-mile Calder Derby has been reinstated this season after not being run in 2011.

LEXINGTON, Ky. – A crush of horses bearing down from his outside would be something brand new for Hansen. As fast as he is, the nearly white colt has grown accustomed to free-wheeling out front, and never in his first five races has he encountered any such difficulty.

By the time Tackleberry loaded into the starting gate for last April’s $1 million Charles Town Classic, he had run four times in 2011 and 10 times in 10 months.

After setting the pace in the three-turn race, Tackleberry faded to fourth, four lengths behind fellow Florida-based Duke of Mischief.

Saturday night, when Tackleberry re-loads into the Charles Town starting gate for the Classic, he will be making just his second start in 11 months against a markedly weaker group that includes the off-form Duke of Mischief.[bc_video_id:248933:]

Trainers typically avoid running 3-year-olds against older foes in stakes races until autumn, opting to run them instead in races restricted to their age division. The exceptions come when a 3-year-old has that extra something that suggests they can tackle older foes, or when stakes conditions just fit the 3-year-old too well to give it a pass.

As it applies to Saturday’s $50,000 JEH Stallion Stakes Saturday at Lone Star Park, Nurse Goodnight, a 3-year-old filly, fits both qualifications.

ARCADIA, Calif. – Mario Gutierrez was 17 in 2004 and had just finished high school in Veracruz, Mexico, when he announced his grand career plans to his parents. He wanted to move to Mexico City, and become a jockey.

“I said, ‘Let me try it in Mexico City for a year,’ ” he remembers.

A year, his parents said. Give it a year. If you are not successful, come home and head to college, they said.

After a year, Gutierrez was ready to leave Mexico City, but he went north, all the way to Hastings Park in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he became a leading rider.