OCEANPORT, N.J. - These are sweet times to run a horse at Monmouth Park, especially a New Jersey-bred.
The feature race Thursday, a first-level allowance for statebreds, carries a hefty $55,000 purse. This same race was worth $50,500 on Aug. 18. The listed value in the condition book is $46,000.
Correcting an underpayment from earlier in the meet, Monmouth Park has pushed purses higher and higher throughout August.
DEL MAR, Calif. - Jockey Martin Garcia was taken to Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, Calif., on Monday for X-rays of his right wrist after being unseated from his mount Valiant Blues at the start of the sixth race.
Valiant Blues appeared to clip the heels of the horse just to his inside, Sea Driver, only a few strides out of the gate in the one-mile race. Garcia landed heavily on the track, and track workers acted quickly to get him off the race course, being as he was laying prone only yards in front of the finish line. The race continued without interruption.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - At the sixteenth pole of Saturday's $1 million , with a victory aboard Bernardini secure, jockey Javier Castellano began pointing to his colt and gave him several pats on his neck.
"I wanted all the people to recognize that he's a special horse and he's the best 3-year-old right now in the country," Castellano said.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Trainer Todd Pletcher isn't asking for a big step forward from Brushed Gold in the $70,000 P.G. Johnson Wednesday at Saratoga. He would settle for a repeat of her maiden victory.
, a Stonerside Stable homebred daughter of Touch Gold, won her only start by a half-length on the grass July 31 at Saratoga. She steps right into stakes company at the same 1 1/16-mile distance as the maiden race against eight other 2-year-old fillies on the Mellon Turf Course.
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Papi Chullo's North American tour heads East this week as the well-traveled 4-year-old is set to arrive in Saratoga on Wednesday to run in Saturday's Grade 1, $500,000 Woodward Stakes.
The Woodward will be Papi Chullo's second race in less than two weeks as he comes out of a second-place finish in the Longacres Mile at Emerald Downs in Auburn, Wash. Earlier this year, Papi Chullo finished third in the Grade 2 San Diego Handicap at Del Mar following a second-level allowance win at Hollywood Park on July 2.
DEL MAR, Calif. - Just as Lava Man completed an unprecedented single-season sweep of California's major dirt races for older horses in the Pacific Classic, so too did T.H. Approval secure a similar hat trick of long-distance turf races with his win on Sunday in the Del Mar Handicap.
DEL MAR, Calif. - Ces't Mark ran like an experienced filly when she closed through the stretch to win the California Thoroughbred Breeders Association Stakes at Del Mar on July 21.
In her third start, rallied wide to outfinish the 19-1 shot Won More Penny by a neck. The victory was the first stakes win for Ces't Mark.
Trainer Jose Silva expects Ces't Mark to leave Del Mar next week with another stakes win. The chance comes in Wednesday's $100,000 Generous Portion Stakes for California-bred 2-year-old fillies.
CHICAGO - There are only seven horses in the featured eighth race on Wednesday at Arlington Park, and since four of the seven are trained by either Hugh Robertson or Michelle Boyce, one might think that the winner would come from one of those barns. But that would be failing to take into account the Dini factor. Trainer Mike Dini, pretty much out of nowhere, has won 14 races with only 50 starters at this meet, and in Megawattie, Dini and owner John Orecchio have the horse to beat in the Wednesday feature.
CHICAGO - Arlington Park plans to scrape clean its racing surface and conduct a survey of the surface's limestone base shortly after the conclusion of the racing meet, according to Arlington's president, Roy Arnold. The post-meet scraping of the dirt track has been performed for the last four years, but the limestone base has not been surveyed since the current track surface was installed in 1984.
OCEANPORT, N.J. - The $80,000 Twin Lights Stakes on the turf Wednesday at Monmouth Park attracted seven 3-year-old fillies with varying degrees of experience, ranging from a stakes winner to a maiden.
Scholastic Giant is somewhere in between. She is stakes-placed, having run second in the Pin Oak Stud Hildene Stakes at six furlongs on the main track at Laurel in December.
Scholastic Giant made her last three starts on the grass, winning a first-level allowance race here last time out with a strong front-running effort.
