VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Joey’s Jewel will try to win her fourth race from five starts this year when she runs in a $25,000 claiming race restricted to British Columbia-bred 3-year-old fillies at Hastings on Friday. The 6 1/2-furlong sprint drew seven horses and appears to be a wide-open event.
ELMONT, N.Y. – Whether it was the mud, the competition, or something else, last month’s Grade 1 Acorn Stakes proved not to be the ideal spot for either Victoria’s Wildcat or Savvy Supreme.
Friday, those two fillies will meet again while cutting back in distance and class in the $60,000 Sometime Thing Stakes at Belmont Park. Originally scheduled for last Sunday, the Sometime Thing finally got enough entries to be carded on Friday’s nine-race twilight racing program that begins at 3 p.m. Eastern.
Delaware Park-based trainer Tim Ritchey shipped in a sharp filly to score as the odds-on favorite in last year’s Daylily Stakes and appears capable of repeating the feat in Friday night’s running of the $75,000 Daylily for female sprinters at Penn National Race Course.
Eskimo's Best needed the entire Indiana Downs turf course stretch, but she got up to win her second consecutive Florence Henderson Tuesday evening.
Trained by Richard Kohnhorst, Eskimo's Best pressed the pace under Victor Lebron in the 1 1/16-mile race for Indiana-bred fillies and mares. She edged past Whistlin Jean late to win the $87,550 race by a neck. Whistlin Jean was second, 1 1/2 lengths in front of Dr. Powers in third.
A 5-year-old daughter of Best of Luck, Eskimo's Best returned $4.40 and ran the distance in 1:44.88.
ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – Mike Stidham has sent out the winner in four of Arlington’s last five turf stakes for 3-year-olds. Workin for Hops won the Arlington Classic and the American Derby in 2010, a feat his stablemate Willcox Inn has duplicated in 2011, but this year, Stidham hopes he capture the big prize, the $400,000 Secretariat.
A day after returning to Saratoga, where he launched a championship juvenile campaign with a runaway debut victory on Travers Day, Uncle Mo beat the heat with an early-morning gallop on the Oklahoma training track Tuesday.
Under hot and humid conditions, with the mercury climbing well into the 80s by mid-morning, Uncle Mo was out at 6 a.m. to gallop 1 1/4 miles.
“He galloped well this morning,” said trainer Todd Pletcher, who recently said bringing Uncle Mo back in the Grade 1 King’s Bishop Stakes on Aug. 27 was “doable.”
ELMONT, N.Y. – Connie and Michael, last year’s Mother Goose runner-up and sidelined since running sixth in the Alabama Stakes, makes her seasonal debut against seven other 4-year-old fillies in Thursday’s $54,000 optional claiming feature scheduled for the Widener turf at seven furlongs.
Susan’s Girl, a two-time winner of the Delaware Handicap, and trainer Oscar White, who won the Delaware Handicap twice and the Delaware Oaks three times during a career that spanned more than three decades, are among the five newest inductees to Delaware Park’s Wall of Fame.
The remainder of the class of 2011, announced Tuesday, are jockey William Hartack, E.P. Taylor’s Windfields Farm, and former longtime Delaware executive John W. Rooney.
AUBURN, Wash. – Emerald Downs reached the midpoint of its 82-day meeting last Sunday, and there’s good news to report. Through the initial 41 days, the average daily handle was $1,254,473, an increase of 1.2 percent from the corresponding date a year ago.
Remarkably, ontrack attendance was up 16 percent, Emerald Downs president Ron Crockett said.
ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Guest Appearing caused a stir on Queen’s Plate Day when he spooked from the drumbeats of a nearby band during the post parade, dumping jockey Tyler Pizarro.
Despite being shaken up, Pizarro remounted and rode him in a 22-1 upset score over Ontario-sired maiden special opponents.
Guest Appearing will return in Thursday’s Woodbine headliner as one of two Mark Casse-trained runners in the Ontario-sired allowance route for 3-year-olds, along with Nine Winds.
