BALTIMORE – The curse of Apollo doesn’t pertain to the Preakness.
It is an often-cited fact that no horse has won the Kentucky Derby without having raced at age 2 since Apollo in 1882. In the Preakness, however, three horses in the last 17 years – Red Bullet (2000), Bernardini (2006), and Curlin (2007) – have captured the middle jewel of the Triple Crown without having raced as a juvenile.
Do two weeks really make that much of a difference?
Probably not.
Brendan Walsh grew up on a farm in County Cork, Ireland. But don’t assume he was born into horse racing.
“We had cattle, crops – it was that kind of farm,” Walsh said. “It was the kind of farm that you had to work fairly hard at. My old man worked the [crap] out of me. And I hated farm work.”
None of Walsh’s family, it turns out, could tell a mane from a tail. Yet young Brendan somehow became smitten with horses while he was little more than a wee lad.
The modern Triple Crown tilts heavily toward the Derby, with its demand for 20 horses and its overstuffed hype aided and abetted by a compliant media. The idea that an owner would skip the first race with a top horse in favor of the second has become an absurdity on a par with those pigs who keep trying to fly.
This weekend on DRF Tournaments, nine players won their way into next Saturday’s Grade 1 Preakness qualifier for the World Championship of Handicapping. Players put up $95 to play and one in seven entries will go forward. On Saturday, Jared Schledorn, David Dolinsky, Peter Acocella, Ronald Tackett, Michael Foster, and Justin Dew advanced, and on Sunday, Nicholas McMurdy, John Nichols, and Brent Sumja went through to the big Preakness game.
Royal Mo, who suffered a career-ending sesamoid fracture to his right front ankle Sunday at Pimlico Race Course during what was to be his last drill for the Preakness Stakes on Saturday, was scheduled to undergo surgery Monday to fuse the joint, trainer John Shirreffs said.
As of Sunday morning, the extended weather forecast for Baltimore is good – a bit steamy midweek, but good. AccuWeather says the only chance for precipitation there all week is on Friday, when a couple of showers are “possible,” and the National Weather Service has no precipitation at all listed for Baltimore all week.
Both weather services say no rain for Baltimore on Preakness Saturday, with high temperatures cooling to the upper 70s.
Royal Mo suffered a career-ending sesamoid fracture to his right front ankle on Sunday morning at Pimlico Race Course during a workout that was to be his last drill for the Preakness Stakes on Saturday, trainer John Shirreffs said.
Shirreffs said Royal Mo had fractured the inside sesamoid in that ankle.
Lexington Stakes winner Senior Investment worked five furlongs in 1:02 at Keeneland on Sunday morning in his final serious pre-Preakness move. The colt hit the wire well in front of older stablemate Some in Tieme - a Group 1 winner in his native Brazil, and a close second in a Keeneland allowance last out - and continued to move away while galloping out six furlongs in 1:14.
Channing Hill, who rode Senior Investment to win the Lexington on April 15, was aboard for the work. The Ken McPeek trainee was sixth in the Louisiana Derby in his prior start.
ELMONT, N.Y. – Before Mother Nature poured buckets of water on Long Island on Saturday morning, trainer Chad Brown was able to get in Cloud Computing’s last major workout before next Saturday’s 142nd Preakness Stakes at Pimlico.
