CALGARY, Alberta - The first two stakes of the Alberta season were run over two very different surfaces, as a fast track Saturday turned to mud Sunday.
Dance Me Free captured the six-furlong Stampede Park Sprint on Saturday afternoon. Ridden by Desmond Bryan, Dance Me Free enjoyed a tracking trip behind longshot Smooth Cruiser and made his bid at the sixteenth pole.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Eurosilver, who was one of the top-rated 3-year-olds this spring before missing the Triple Crown because of an untimely illness, was moved Sunday into trainer Carl Nafzger's barn at the Highpoint Training Center outside Louisville.
Eurosilver had been trained by Nick Zito until Mahmoud Fustok, owner of Buckram Oak Farm, decided to end his business relationship with Zito. The Buckram Oak horses were turned over to other trainers, most notably Eurosilver to Nafzger.
"The colt looks real good," Nafzger said Monday at Churchill Downs.
ELMONT, N.Y. - While many of the nation's top handicap horses will gather in Baltimore on Friday for the Grade 1, $500,000 Pimlico Special, trainer Bobby Frankel's duo of Medaglia d'Oro and Peace Rules will await other engagements down the road.
ELMONT, N.Y. - Handicappers will find it difficult to narrow the field down to horses who can get the 1 1/4-mile distance in Wednesday's $60,000-added Sabin Stakes on the turf at Belmont Park.
The majority of the nine fillies and mares in the field have won at that distance or longer.
To be eligible to run in the Sabin, a horse cannot have won a graded stakes.
Suffolk Downs in East Boston, Mass., added eight statebred stakes to its schedule on Monday, beginning with the Rise Jim Stakes on May 29 and concluding with the Sunset Gun Stakes on Labor Day, Sept. 6.
The statebred stakes will all be $40,000 in value and join a schedule of 11 open stakes that were previously announced. The open stakes are topped by the $500,000 Massachusetts Handicap and $200,000 Moseley Breeders' Cup on June 19, and include nine $40,000 races. The Suffolk Downs meeting opened May 1 and will continue through Nov. 27.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Wednesday's pick six at Hollywood Park starts with a carryover of $143,950, and there are plenty of horses to go around for bettors. The large fields create the possibility of a lucrative payoff, or even another carryover.
The pick six races are the third through eighth - four sprints and two routes on turf. The shortest field is seven in the seventh race, a six-furlong allowance for fillies and mares, and four of the pick six races have 10 or more entrants.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Glick, the winner of the San Simeon Handicap, a turf sprint at Santa Anita April 18, is being pointed for the Group 1 Golden Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot in England on June 19, trainer Jeff Mullins said Sunday.
Glick would be the first starter in Europe for Mullins, the top trainer at the Santa Anita winter-spring meeting this year.
GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - Beau's Town, who ran six furlongs in a track-record time of 1:07.89 on Saturday at Lone Star Park, will take his next step toward the Breeders' Cup Sprint in one of two races, said his owner, Dave Hulkewicz.
The Grade 3, $150,000 Aristides Breeders' Cup Handicap at Churchill Downs on June 19 is the most probable, while an outside possibility is the $100,000 Beck Auto Group Turf Sprint at Lone Star on May 31.
SAN MATEO, Calif. - Trainer Chuck Jenda has been to the mountaintop.
In 1989, Brown Bess blossomed under his care and became the only northern California-based Eclipse Award winner when she was voted the nation's top female turf runner.
But as good a job as Jenda did with Brown Bess, a multiple Grade 1-winning millionaire, he may be doing even better with A B Noodle, who scored her first graded-stakes victory Saturday in the Grade 3 Yerba Buena Handicap.