BOSSIER CITY, La. - Keep your friends close, and your chief rivals closer. That summed up the draw for trainer John Ward, who will send out Strong Contender against favorite Lawyer Ron in the Grade 2, $500,000 race at Louisiana Downs on Saturday.
Posts for the 1 1/8-mile race were drawn Wednesday, and Lawyer Ron got gate 2 in the field of eight, right outside of the rail-drawn Strong Contender. The two horses are Grade 2 winners, and will meet for the first time in the Super Derby.
ELMONT, N.Y. - Though he has spent the majority of the last 22 years based primarily in New York, trainer Rusty Arnold knew that someday he would return to his old Kentucky home. He just didn't think someday would come right now.
But by the end of this month, Arnold will take virtually all of his horses out of Belmont Park's Barn 27 and bring them to Keeneland, where he will maintain a year-round stable. With the exception of Saratoga - he hopes - Arnold will no longer have a presence in New York.
Silverfoot will be back in the rural environs of Franklin, Ky., on Saturday to defend his title in the Kentucky Cup Turf, the Grade 3 race that serves as the annual highlight of the Kentucky Downs meet.
Silverfoot, trained by Dallas Stewart, posted a seven-length victory with a terrific late surge in the $200,000 Kentucky Cup Turf last year and has since retained solid form while keeping high-class company. He is scheduled to face eight other older horses in the 10th running of the 1 1/2-mile Turf.
EDMONTON, Alberta -- Deputy Fudge has won his last two races from off the pace, and with plenty of speed signed on for Friday?s seventh race, he should get an ideal trip in the $30,000 claimer here at Northlands Park.
Pure, Viscount Victor G, and Saskatchewan invader Sand Rush will ensure an honest pace in the one-mile feature, and jockey Perry Winters, who rode Deputy Fudge in his last two, figures to sit a stalking trip behind that trio.
Jockey Rafael Bejarano, sidelined since Aug. 25 with a broken rib, is scheduled to return to action Wednesday night at Turfway Park in Florence, Ky.
The comeback means that Bejarano, the ninth-leading jockey in North America this year with more than $8.8 million in mount earnings, will be available to ride in the Sept. 30 Kentucky Cup series, easily the richest day of the 22-day Turfway fall meet.
CHICAGO - The jockey Ramsey Zimmerman hasn't ridden regularly in Chicago in several seasons, and hadn't ridden anywhere this year until Friday's opening day at Hawthorne Race Course.
Zimmerman lost his license late last summer after testing positive for the drug methadone while he was on top of the jockey standings at Fairmount Park. Zimmerman, who has had other brushes with racing authority, was issued an exercise rider's license some time ago, and after receiving a conditional jockey's license, began taking mounts last week.
POMONA, Calif. - Scoonerwharf-bardog is not the most elegantly named 2-year-old in the $65,000 Gateway to Glory Stakes on Thursday at Fairplex Park, but so what?
The improving 2-year-old enters the 1 1/16-mile stakes as the best gamble in the race, and a running advertisement for a colorful Key West saloon where trainer Jeff Mullins and his wife, Amy, celebrated the February private purchase of a then-unnamed colt.
The singer started in on a tune about an old dog - the Schooner Wharf Bar dog. "That's it, that's [the colt's] name." Mullins said.
