GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - Like mother, like son.
That's what trainer John Kimmel is hoping for with Awesome Twist, a son of the Grade 1-winning race mare Twist Afleet who will make his stakes debut Saturday in the Grade 3, $300,000 Walmac Lone Star Derby.
Kimmel is the co-breeder, majority owner, and trainer of Awesome Twist, who shares many similarities with Twist Afleet, including the same chestnut coloring, white facial markings, and willing personality.
ELMONT, N.Y. - When trainer Robert Barbara saw the races that were written in Belmont Park's first condition book, he thought he could get off to a solid start at the meet.
In a racing rarity, it's worked out just as Barbara thought it would.
In the first seven days of the meet, Barbara has won 4 races from his first 9 starters. Considering he had gone 4 for 52 in the first four months of the year, it was a much-needed shot in the arm for him.
CHICAGO - The Ribbon Stakes, the featured eighth race Saturday at Arlington, drew a field of seven 3-year-old fillies, and nobody really expected talent of this grade to show up.
"That came up a salty spot, didn't it?" said trainer John Ward.
Ward, who starts , was reasonably looking at the six-furlong Ribbon as something akin to a second-level allowance race for 3-year-old fillies, a condition that nearly has gone extinct in the spring, as trainers opt to run in stakes rather than allowances.
CHICAGO - The third National Jockey Club at Hawthorne meet ended Tuesday on a sour note, with a decline in betting on Hawthorne races and a conflict between jockeys and track management over the condition of the grass course.
With ontrack attendance averaging less than 2,000 per day, the steepest drop during a meet that began Feb. 25 came in the category of ontrack handle on Hawthorne races, which fell more than 13 percent from 2004, to $194,257.
The Louisiana-bred Happy Ticket emerged as one of the Mid-South region's best 3-year-old fillies last year, going undefeated in seven starts in her first season of racing. She returns from a five-month layoff Saturday, and will be favored to make it eight straight in the $50,000 Southern Accent at Louisiana Downs.
Defending champion Only at Night squares off against Switch Lanes and four other Iowa-bred filly and mares in Saturday's $60,000 Mamie Eisenhower Stakes at Prairie Meadows.
Only at Night, a front-running 6-year-old daughter of Olympio trained by Suzanne Evans, scored a gate-to-wire three-quarter-length victory in last year's six-furlong Eisenhower. She has gone winless, however, in five races since.
Catch My Cat, second in her seasonal debut in the Edward Babst Memorial Handicap at Beulah Park on April 16, takes up high weight of 123 pounds to head a field of six Ohio-bred 3-year-olds and up in the $40,000 Mike Rowland Memorial Handicap at Thistledown.
Dontcallmeillcallu rates a slight edge when she faces six others in Saturday's $12,500 Princess Stakes for 3-year-old fillies at six furlongs, which starts out the stakes season at Lincoln.
A Washington-bred filly, Dontcallmeillcallu will be making her stakes debut in the Princess, turning back in distance off her nonwinners-of-two allowance victory at Fonner Park on May 1. She can race on the pace or come from behind and will have the riding services of R.D. Williams.
Asking a young horse to try a new surface against stakes competition while coming off an 8 1/2-month layoff may sound like too monumental a task.
But don't underestimate trainer Graham Motion, who has given that assignment to the 3-year-old filly Speedy Deedy in Saturday's $75,000 Hilltop Breeders' Cup, a 1 1/16-mile turf race at Pimlico.
Although Speedy Deedy has never raced on grass and has been idle since last August, she could be the value play in a field of eight where nearly every horse is either untested in stakes or on turf.
