BALTIMORE – Regarding jockey Julian Pimentel’s first Triple Crown mount, the memories are all about the experience, not the result.
Pimentel rode Norman Asbjornson in the 2011 Preakness for Maryland trainer Christopher Grove. The colt, off a fourth-place finish in the Wood Memorial, was a 42-1 shot and ran like it, stalking the pace for half the race before fading to 11th.
BALTIMORE – If Wesley Ward has been typecast as a master with 2-year-old Thoroughbreds, well, so be it.
“Over the years, clients started upgrading their pedigrees, and I’ve gotten to train some really nice babies,” Ward said. “Eventually, the horses get older, you know. That’s allowed me to build a pretty nice stable.”
One of those flashy 2-year-olds has matured into a 3-year-old worthy of running in the Triple Crown series: Pablo Del Monte, bred and owned by Ward in partnership with the powerful Coolmore group, will start Saturday in the 139th Preakness Stakes at Pimlico.
Willie Delgado left Maryland in August. He had been training a few horses and exercising horses for another stable. He went to Southern California to visit his brother, Alberto, a longtime jockey and former Maryland mainstay with more than 2,900 wins. Willie, 46, moved to California in September.
“I had a bunch of bad horses,” Delgado said. “I was galloping for Dove Houghton and training on my own. It just never peaked for me with training. I just went back to what I do best, which is galloping horses.”
When the New York Racing Association announced major increases to its stakes purses this year, longtime Pimlico racing secretary Georgeanne Hale felt she had to do something to compete.
So, Pimlico has come up with a $100,000 bonus system that is enticing trainers to enter more horses than they might have otherwise in the 15 stakes to be run here Friday and Saturday.
“We felt we had to come up with a way to get bigger fields for fans to bet on Preakness Weekend,” said Hale, the racing secretary here since 2000.
BALTIMORE – California Chrome had been standing on the Pimlico loam for only a minute or two Tuesday morning when he let out an inordinately long and loud whinny, as if to say, “What is this new place?”
Some 30 minutes later, after the colt had made an uneventful first-ever circuit of the track, assistant trainer Alan Sherman grinned about it.
“That’s him,” said Sherman.
BALTIMORE – New shooters: That’s the term for horses jumping into the Preakness Stakes without running in the Kentucky Derby.
In recent years, the new shooters have had no shot.
Horses exiting the Derby swept the top five spots in the 2013 Preakness, ran 1-2-3 in 2012, and were 1-2-4-6 in 2011.
California Chrome, the Kentucky Derby winner, left Kentucky on Monday bound for Baltimore, where on Saturday he will attempt to keep his Triple Crown hopes alive in the 139th Preakness Stakes. It appears he will face nine rivals, exactly half of what he met in the Derby.
The filly who could have won the Preakness won’t be in Baltimore on Saturday.
Untapable captured the Kentucky Oaks in sensational fashion, a performance significantly faster than California Chrome’s Kentucky Derby victory the next day. But trainer Steve Asmussen and owner Ron Winchell decided almost immediately against challenging males in the Preakness. “It is not in her interests to run back in two weeks,” the trainer said.
BALTIMORE - Showing no lingering effects from a foot bruise that forced him to be scratched from a Gulfstream stakes race May 3, Social Inclusion worked a fast, strong four furlongs with a powerful gallop-out Monday morning at Pimlico in a prep for the Preakness Stakes on Saturday.
