OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Valiance, the Grade 1 Spinster winner and runner-up to Monomoy Girl in last Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup Distaff, will remain in training for a 5-year-old campaign, her connections said Wednesday.
Valiance was withdrawn from Sunday’s Fasig-Tipton November auction and is getting a freshening at WinStar Farm before joining trainer Todd Pletcher’s South Florida string early in 2021.
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Independence Hall is on schedule for his California stakes debut in the Grade 1 Malibu Stakes on Dec. 26 at Santa Anita after winning his first start in the state in an allowance race at 6 1/2 furlongs on Sunday at Del Mar.
Independence Hall closed from fifth in a field of eight to win by 1 1/2 lengths in the shortest trip of his six-race career.
“I don’t know if we need to try any shorter,” trainer Michael McCarthy said Wednesday.
Madone, eighth in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf on Nov. 6 at Keeneland, underwent surgery earlier this week to have a bone chip removed from an ankle.
Trainer Simon Callaghan said Wednesday that Madone will not race again until late spring.
“She will have 60 days, which we would have given her anyhow,” he said. “We’ll bring her back April time and hopefully we’ll have a filly to point toward the 3-year-old series.”
Many of the leading races for 3-year-old fillies on turf across the nation are run in the summer and fall.
Red King, a two-time stakes winner this year who was ninth in the Breeders’ Cup Turf on Saturday at Keeneland, emerged from the race in good condition and is under consideration for the Grade 2 Hollywood Turf Cup on Nov. 27 at Del Mar.
On Wednesday, Red King jogged on the Del Mar main track.
“I wouldn’t say the Hollywood Turf Cup is out of the question,” trainer Phil D’Amato said Wednesday. “I’ll let him tell me. He looked really good this morning.”
MIAMI – After a while, South Floridians tend to get used to all the rain that falls around here during the summer and into the fall. But nobody around these parts can remember a rainy season quite like the one that has plagued the local area over the past six weeks and has put quite a damper on the annual Gulfstream Park West meet, which began Oct. 3 and runs through Nov. 28.
There will be at least one 3-year-old in the $600,000 Champion of Champions on Dec. 12 at Los Alamitos following a win by Tell Cartel in the $1,052,350 Los Alamitos Super Derby on Sunday.
Tell Cartel earned an automatic berth to the Champion of Champions, which is run at 440 yards and is comparable to the Breeders’ Cup Classic in that it brings together a field of leading older horses in a race that plays a significant role in year-end voting.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Art Collector will head to South Carolina for the winter after bleeding internally in a second straight disappointing effort. The 3-year-old Bernardini colt faded to eighth as the 9-2 third choice last Saturday in the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile at Keeneland.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Princess Grace made the kind of run that’ll win a race nine times out of 10. Unfortunately for her, a record-setting rally from Stunning Sky snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last month in the Valley View at Keeneland.
“She was really unlucky to lose that day,” said Mike Stidham, who is sending Princess Grace back to Kentucky from his northern Maryland base for the Grade 2 Mrs. Revere Stakes on Saturday at Churchill Downs.
Former jockey and trainer Richard Wright died peacefully at home Monday in Renton, Wash.
According to his son, Blaine Wright, “he died of old age and was three weeks shy of his eighty-second birthday.”
Richard Wright began riding match races when he was 12 or 13 and was usually in the top 10 in the jockey standings for 22 years at Longacres, Playfair, and Portland Meadows.
He retired from riding in 1974 and took out his trainer’s license in 1976. He won 962 races as a trainer, with his most important victory coming in the 1982 Longacres Derby with Flying Judgement.
