HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – By My Standards emerged from his career-best performance in the Grade 2, $600,000 Oaklawn Handicap on Saturday in good order and now has a goal of targeting a Grade 1 race, trainer Bret Calhoun said Sunday.
By My Standards was a 1 3/4-length winner of the Oaklawn Handicap, defeating a field that included Santa Anita Handicap winner Combatant and Grade 2 winners Mr Freeze, Tacitus, and Tax.
“I thought it was a really, really good field of quality horses,” Calhoun said.
In a world free of the coronavirus, Tiz the Law would have spent Saturday morning at Churchill Downs going through the usual preparations prior to parading postward as the likely favorite in the Kentucky Derby.
Instead, Florida Derby winner Tiz the Law spent Saturday morning at the Palm Meadows training center in Florida where he breezed an easy five furlongs in 1:01.45 under exercise rider Heather Smullen, continuing to bide his time awaiting whatever as yet undetermined race will be his next.
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. - Trainer Ken McPeek had Swiss Skydiver primed for a top performance the first Friday in May. But instead of coming in the Kentucky Oaks, which has been postponed to Sept. 4, it came in the Grade 3, $400,000 Fantasy at Oaklawn Park.
Swiss Skydiver won the mile and a sixteenth race in a sharp time of 1:42 and earned a preliminary Beyer Speed Figure of 99. It’s the top number put up by a 3-year-old filly so far in North America, according to statistics from Daily Racing Form.
If you watched Welder run a well-beaten fourth as the odds-on favorite Dec. 14 at Remington in his 6-year-old finale you might have wondered how he’d fare making his 7-year-old debut in the TRAO Sprint Stakes on April 28 at Will Rogers Downs.
Trainer Miguel Angel Silva on Friday afternoon was driving a truck pulling a horse van from Fonner Park to Sam Houston Race Park. The horse behind him was Sleepy Eyes Todd, who on Wednesday had won the $50,000 Bosselman Pump and Pantry / Gus Fonner Stakes by 6 1/2 lengths.
“That was my first time at Fonner,” Silva said. “Obviously, I love it now.”
Sleepy Eyes Todd never had raced around a small bullring racetrack like Fonner’s, and frankly, Silva was far from certain his horse would like the experience.
Santa Anita has scheduled 29 stakes from May 16 through June 21, but nine races, including four Grade 1 races, will have lower purse levels than originally scheduled before the track was closed in late March because of the coronavirus outbreak.
Santa Anita intends to reopen on May 15, pending approval from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. Santa Anita last raced on March 22 and was closed by county health officials on March 27 when deemed a nonessential business in the pandemic.
Churchill Downs announced Thursday that it plans to begin its spring meet without spectators on Saturday, May 16.
The track will card races on Saturday and Sunday during the first week and will race Thursdays through Sundays in subsequent weeks. A special Memorial Day card will be offered on Monday, May 25. First post for each race day is 1 p.m. Eastern.
The announcement came a day after Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear declared that the Churchill Downs backstretch could reopen on Monday, May 11.
Canterbury Park will open its stable area May 8 but a time frame for running a 2020 race meets at the Minnesota track remains uncertain.
Canterbury’s backstretch was scheduled to open April 24 in advance of opening day on May 15 before Minnesota was placed on coronavirus lockdown by Gov. Tim Waltz. Thursday, Waltz issued an executive order, specifically including Canterbury’s backstretch, permitting some businesses to reopen.
Vekoma and Point of Honor, two of George Weaver’s graded stakes winners from a year ago, got their seasons off to solid starts, and the trainer is anxiously awaiting a schedule to map out plans for them.
Vekoma, last year’s Grade 2 Blue Grass Stakes winner, came off an 11-month layoff to win the Sir Shackleton Stakes on March 28 at Gulfstream with a 102 Beyer Speed Figure.
Shortly after his eight-length debut victory last May at Churchill Downs, Hop Kat was sidelined with an ankle chip, costing him the remainder of his 2-year-old season.
While Hop Kat also missed the first quarter of his 3-year-old season, in actuality he didn’t miss that much at all. His connections hope that Hop Kat’s allowance victory last Sunday at Gulfstream Park may have come at the right time to set himself up for a solid summer campaign.
“I guess for this year, it’s good timing for a comeback,” trainer Eddie Kenneally said.
