INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Lady Railrider has come a long way since she won her debut in a $2,000 race at Les Bois, a minor racetrack in Idaho, in June 2007.
Three years and 20 starts later, Lady Railrider has emerged as a leading older female California-bred and is the likely favorite to score a repeat win Saturday in the $100,000 Cal Cup Matron at 1 1/16 miles.
The key was continuity.
In the hours after Scoop Vessels died in a plane crash in Oregon on Aug. 11, Vessels Stallion Farm manager Kevin Dickson mourned with Scoop Vessels’s widow, Bonnie. It was more than just an employee-to-family-member situation. Kevin Dickson is Bonnie Vessels’s brother-in-law.
“That night, she looked at me and said, ‘He would want this to go on,’ ” Dickson recalled this week. “I made my vow that I would do the best I can.”
INGLEWOOD, Calif. – The California Cup program will feature three maiden races for the first time this year, after the list of races was redesigned earlier this year to eliminate two starter handicaps and a stakes that had drawn limited support.
Added to the list of races are $40,000 maiden races over six furlongs for 2-year-olds, 2-year-old fillies, and for 3-year-olds and up on turf. Gone are the $50,000 starter sprint, the $50,000 starter handicap on turf, and the $100,000 Distance Handicap for fillies and mares over 1 1/4 miles on turf.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Even if the gelding Cost of Freedom has lost a step at age 7, the speedster remains the horse to catch Saturday in the $100,000 California Cup Sprint at Hollywood Park.
And even if 3-year-old Goggles McCoy has never faced older stakes horses, the lightly raced gelding poses the main threat in the six-furlong Sprint, race 1 of 10 on the all-statebred California Cup card on closing weekend of the Oak Tree meet at Hollywood Park.
ELMONT, N.Y. – Sheikh Mohammed’s current crop of top-caliber, one-turn horses will be headed to Churchill Downs for next weekend’s Breeders’ Cup. His Godolphin Stable’s potential future top rated, one-turn horse will be running Saturday at Belmont Park in the Grade 3, $100,000 Bold Ruler Handicap.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Trainer Charles Lopresti is excited about the prospect of participating in his first Breeders’ Cup, especially considering he’ll be represented by two horses with excellent chances to win their respective races – Here Comes Ben in the Dirt Mile and Wise Dan in the Sprint.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. − Sentimentally, it was a great idea. Realistically, the spur-of-the-moment idea to claim Remember Dorothy at Del Mar in 2000 looked iffy. Who really needs a 2-year-old filly who was a well-beaten fourth and fifth in her first two starts and was dropping in for a $32,000 price for the first time?
For Bruce Corwin and his son, David, that was not a factor. Less than two weeks earlier, Bruce’s mother, Dorothy, had died, and they had found a filly who, by coincidence, had the perfect name.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Luckarack’s three-race unbeaten streak ended with a fifth-place finish in the Angel Island Stakes at Golden Gate Fields on Sept. 11, a loss that left trainer Steve Specht puzzled.
“He didn’t run as well as I thought he would,” Specht said. “The next afternoon he had a temperature and was sick for a couple of days. Maybe he had something coming on. I’m pretty high on the colt, but that last one put some doubt in my mind.”
INGLEWOOD, Calif. – The Grade 2 Oak Tree Mile at Hollywood Park on Oct. 9 was supposed to be a preview of California’s best hopes for the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Churchill Downs on Nov. 6. Instead, the turf race turned out to be an advance showing of two of the top runners in Saturday’s $100,000 California Cup Mile.
The 5-year-old geldings Liberian Freighter and Colgan’s Chip finished just a nose apart and are two of the top contenders in Saturday’s Cal Cup Mile, which is run on turf and has drawn a field of six.
LEXINGTON, Ky. – As Keeneland concludes its fifth fall meet with Polytrack as the main racing surface, the general consensus is that horses with established synthetic form tend to have an edge, although grass horses also fare well on Poly. These handicapping tenets will be mixed and matched to their limits Saturday when the $150,000 Fayette Stakes helps to close the 17-day fall meet.