ELMONT, N.Y. – Wesley Ward enjoyed a fabulous Belmont Park spring/summer meeting and appears in good shape to get his Saratoga meet off to a strong start.
Ward looks to be well represented in both opening-day stakes Thursday at the Spa, as he will run Happy Soul in the Grade 3, $150,000 Schuylerville Stakes for 2-year-old fillies, and Golden Pal in the $120,000 Quick Call Stakes at 5 1/2 furlongs on turf.
Trainer Chad Brown has won the Grade 1 United Nations Stakes three times and will have three chances to get his fourth win July 17 in the 1 3/8-mile turf fixture.
Brown on Friday said he expects to enter Tribhuvan, Master Piece, and Serve the King in the U.N. Serve the King is based at Monmouth and finished fourth in the June 5 Monmouth Stakes, his first race after a long layoff. Master Piece and Tribhuvan will ship from New York. Both last started in the Manhattan, Master Piece finishing sixth, Tribhuvan second.
The field for the $1 million Haskell Invitational is holding steady, with a second Todd Pletcher-trained runner now in the mix and a decision on the participation of California-based Rombauer pending following a Friday workout.
Los Alamitos is eliminating racing on Fridays effective July 16 during its ongoing Quarter Horse and lower-level Thoroughbred meeting due to a shortage of available horses, track owner Ed Allred said Thursday.
The track will race on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
“We’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” Allred said. “It’s difficult to conduct an everyday program.
“The horse population is kind of skewered. We have very few older, cheap Quarter Horses. We have plenty of 2-year-olds. By the time they are 3, they are upper-level allowance horses or better.”
Age 11 is not too late for a racehorse’s renaissance.
From 2017 through 2020, Mongol Bull managed only two wins. Thursday at Arlington, the 11-year-old gelding won his third race in a row, easily beating a bunch of $5,000 claimers. Mongol Bull began his streak in a $10,000 claimer at Hawthorne this past spring and then won a $5,000 claimer at the Arlington meet before repeating on Thursday.
Visually and on Beyer Speed Figures, Army Wife is getting better and better as her 3-year-old season unfolds. A distant third in the April 3 Gazelle, where she got an 82 Beyer, Army Wife went on to win the May 13 Black-Eyed Susan at Pimlico with an 86 Beyer before dominating the Iowa Oaks at Prairie Meadows on July 2.
Army Wife stalked the pace, always traveling comfortably under Joel Rosario, and easily drew away to score by 3 3/4 lengths, notching a career-best 90 Beyer in the 1 1/16-mile contest.
Just as Stilleto Boy has found the best form of his career, his trainer and part-owner, Doug Anderson, is probably losing the gelding.
Anderson on Friday was hauling a horse van with Stilleto Boy aboard from Iowa to Kentucky, where Stilleto Boy will be sold Monday at Fasig-Tipton’s horses of racing age sale July 12.
Stilleto Boy won the Iowa Derby at Prairie Meadows last Friday by more than four lengths, earning a career-best 95 Beyer Speed Figure.
The fastest 2-year-old at Del Mar last summer will try to make history this summer – Dr. Schivel would be the first horse to win both of the track’s prestigious Grade 1 sprints, the Del Mar Futurity and Bing Crosby Stakes for older.
Dr. Schivel will aim to the Bing Crosby on July 31, a race won by stablemate Collusion Illusion last year.
Hidden Stash has been sidelined indefinitely after undergoing surgery shortly after his most recent work June 21 at Keeneland.
Trainer Vicki Oliver said Hidden Stash “had the start of a condylar fracture” in a cannon bone, necessitating insertion of one screw at the affected site to facilitate healing.
“The surgery went great and he started hand-walking back at the barn” on Wednesday, said Oliver. “We’re hoping to have him back racing in the fall.”
HENDERSON, Ky. – Rudy Brisset didn’t bother applying for stalls at Saratoga this summer, even knowing he’d probably have a few horses to run.
“We’ll ship and run from here,” Brisset said this week by phone from his farm in Versailles, Ky. “It just worked out that way this year.”
