Trainer Jeff Engler has finally found a home, and he couldn’t be much happier about it.
“We’ve been welcomed here in Florida with open arms,” Engler said this week by phone from Boynton Beach, where he moved his stable for the first time in the spring. “It’s been refreshing. Everybody has been really good to us.”
On Sunday at Los Alamitos, Proud Emma won the Grade 3 Bayakoa Stakes, a $100,000 race at 1 1/16 miles for fillies and mares. She is scheduled to return in a race with similar conditions and twice the prize money in the Grade 3 La Canada Stakes on Jan. 9 at Santa Anita.
“The timing is good,” trainer Peter Miller said.
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Kentucky Downs officials announced Thursday that a sizable portion of the 1 5/16-mile turf course has undergone a major renovation and is expected to be fully ready for the six-day meet in September 2021.
New sod has been laid from the six-furlong pole to the eighth pole, extending 63 feet in width around the sweeping far turn and into the homestretch. The newly laid portions include a perennial trouble spot near the three-eighths pole.
HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – Friday’s 10-race program will close out with a pair of $47,000 allowance events. And while there should be considerable interest in the field of promising 2-year-olds who’ll square off at a mile on the grass in the ninth race, the primary focus this day will be on the nightcap, which marks the 34th and likely final start in the amazing career of the 10-year-old turf-sprint specialist Pay Any Price.
Trainer Peter Miller, who is based in Southern California, said he plans to have a 12- to 15-horse division at Oaklawn Park, which starts its meet Jan. 22.
“The end of December, early January, we’ll be shipping over there,” Miller said. “We’ve got some coming from California. Half of the horses will come from California, and the other half from Kentucky.”
Miller has a division in Kentucky. Home Base, who has been at Churchill, could be part of the Oaklawn string, Miller said. The horse runs Friday at Aqueduct.
Alex Baldillez established himself as an elite Quarter Horse rider during a 40-year career that included a win in the prestigious All American Futurity. Now, he’s training Thoroughbreds.
Baldillez, who retired from riding in 2015, launched a racing stable this fall at Remington Park. He registered his first win Dec. 3 with Implicator in a maiden special weight route. It was the fifth starter for Baldillez.
“I’m used to being in the saddle,” he said. “It felt awkward to leg up that first jockey on my first horse – then it’s out of my hands.”
Dr. Schivel, unraced since a win in the Grade 1 Del Mar Futurity on Sept. 7, is nearing a return to the racetrack after being given a rest in autumn.
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“He comes in in the next few days,” trainer Mark Glatt said on Wednesday. “We’ll do some diagnostic work on him and hopefully he gets the green light to resume training.
Uncle Boogie earned $12,650 when he won a $32,000 claiming race for maidens at Santa Anita in October in his debut.
It would cost a little more than half of that amount to supplement Uncle Boogie to the Grade 2 Los Alamitos Futurity on Dec. 19. Wednesday, trainer Andrew Lerner said he and owner Eric Homme are trying to decide whether to pay the money and run Uncle Boogie in the Futurity, or run him in the Grade 3 Sham Stakes at a mile at Santa Anita on Jan. 2. The $100,000 Sham Stakes is the first graded stakes for Triple Crown hopefuls at the Santa Anita winter-spring meeting.
The busiest jockey at Los Alamitos on Friday will be the leading rider after the first three days of the track’s December meeting.
Apprentice jockey Alexis Centeno is booked to ride all eight races on the Friday program. Through Sunday, Centeno led all riders with four wins, closely pursued by four riders with three wins – Abel Cedillo, Drayden Van Dyke, Juan Hernandez, and Ricardo Gonzalez. The 11-day Los Alamitos meeting runs through Dec. 20 and the riding title may not be decided until that day.
There are plenty of really good horses stabled in New Orleans this winter. A bunch reside in the Brad Cox barn, but trainer Steve Asmussen has a loaded Fair Grounds stable, too.
Quite a bit of the high-end talent worked this week, including a horse who never has started for Asmussen. Shancelot breezed five furlongs Tuesday in 1:00.40, his fifth work at Fair Grounds since Asmussen sent him there in November. Shancelot had breezed steadily through July in Kentucky, but Asmussen had to stop on him over the summer before ramping up the pace of Shancelot’s exercsise.
