INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Kentucky Oaks winner Plum Pretty has been entered for Saturday's $150,000 Hollywood Oaks at Hollywood Park, days after trainer Bob Baffert removed her from consideration for Saturday's $250,000 Mother Goose Stakes at Belmont Park because of a brief illness.
Plum Pretty was found to have a temperature on Monday but it had subsided within 24 hours, Baffert said. As a result, she was not flown to New York, and remained with Baffert's stable in California.
BOSSIER CITY, La. – Fiesty Day, a winner of two of his last three starts for trainer Bob Young, is the one to beat in Friday’s allowance feature at Louisiana Downs. A field of 10 Louisiana-breds looking for their first win outside the maiden or claiming ranks, or those entered for a $12,500 claiming price, will go a mile and a sixteenth on the grass.
Trey Agilar will once again be aboard Fiesty Day, and appears to be a major reason why the 5-year-old Storm Day gelding has returned to his winning ways. Fiesty Day has won five of his 14 career starts but was winless all of 2010.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Lady Sweetness will attempt to win her third consecutive start in a $55,000 allowance race over seven furlongs at Hollywood Park on Friday evening. The allowance race could lead to longer and more important races, if Lady Sweetness runs as well as she did earlier this year.
Trainer Mike Mitchell would like to start Lady Sweetness around two turns later this summer and envisions Friday’s race, the filly’s first start in three months, as a prep race.
AUBURN, Wash. – The prospect of Noosa Beach running in the 2011 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile inched closer to reality this week when owner Jeff Harwood said he was “99 percent sure” he would meet the June 30 deadline to pay a $25,000 Open Enrollment nomination fee that would make Noosa Beach eligible to compete at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday in November.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Orchid’s Silver should appreciate being back with her own sex when she runs in a $12,500 claiming race for fillies and mares that will serve as Friday’s feature at Hastings. The 1 1/16-mile race drew seven horses and will go as race 6 on the seven-race card that begins at 7:15 p.m. Pacific.
River Downs has canceled racing for Wednesday to repair the racetrack, which has sustained damage from recent storms.
Severe storms blew through the Cincinnati area Monday and Tuesday and washed out several sections of the track. The track was closed for training Tuesday and Wednesday. Racing is scheduled to resume on Thursday with a first post of 1 p.m. Eastern.
Turf Paradise announced a boost in purse money for its upcoming 2011/2012 meet, with overnight purses being increased 10 percent and stakes purses 26 percent.
The Phoenix track opens its 157-day meet Oct. 1 and runs through May 6, 2012, with live racing on a Friday-through-Tuesday schedule.
The purses for 32 stakes will be increased to $35,000 from $25,000, and a couple of the meet's marquee events, the Cotton Fitzsimmons Mile and Turf Paradise Derby, will see purse hikes to $75,000 from $50,000.
After a short but successful one-week run at Stockton for the San Joaquin Fair, racing returns to the San Francisco Bay Area on Thursday for the 13-day Alameda County Fair meeting at Pleasanton.
With free fair admission helping to fill the grandstand, Stockton handled more than $1 million per day, showing more than a 40 percent increase for the first two days of the meet, according to Larry Swartzlander, the California Authority of Racing Fairs director of racing.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – With just two weeks of racing remaining at the Churchill Downs meet entering Thursday’s card, jockeys Corey Lanerie and Julien Leparoux are deadlocked in competition for leading rider, with each having 37 wins, 9 more than third-place Shaun Bridgmohan.
So it is fitting that the duo could very well end up dueling aboard their mounts in featured eighth race Thursday at Churchill, a $62,100 first-level allowance in which Leparoux is on 3-1 morning-line favorite Champagne Run and Lanerie on 5-1 third-choice Manx Miss.
