The Maryland Jockey Club has committed an additional $875,000 to stakes purses this spring at Pimlico and created a new $100,000 bonus for trainers who run horses in the 15 stakes on Preakness weekend.
The changes, along with the complete 2014 Pimlico stakes schedule, were announced Tuesday after formal approval was granted by the Maryland Racing Commission.
Bob Baffert has won nine Triple Crown races, but the Hall of Fame trainer had little impact on this year’s races, with no runners in the Kentucky Derby and just one in the Preakness Stakes, and his participation in this year’s Belmont Stakes on June 8 is far from assured, with Baffert on Wednesday saying he was still contemplating whether to run Code West, who worked with stablemate Power Broker on Wednesday morning at Churchill Downs.
The race portion of the Preakness Stakes broadcast on NBC-TV on Saturday drew a 5.9 rating, according to NBC, up 13 percent over the rating for the race portion of the broadcast last year and the highest rating since 2009.
NBC said that the rating translated into 9.7 million viewers. The race portion of the broadcast, from 5:50 p.m. Eastern to 6:39, had a 14 share this year, compared to a 13 last year, NBC said, up 7.7 percent.
Share measures the percentage of televisions in use at the time that are tuned to a broadcast.
By the end of Preakness weekend, it was unclear if the hotter exacta was Wayne Lukas and Gary Stevens or Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez. Call it a dead heat.
Don’t know if Wayne and Gary can do it again in 2014, but if Pitbull, aka Armando Perez, brings J-Lo with him to the Preakness infield next year, they will be a big favorite.
Pitbull was every bit as big in the 2013 infield as Oxbow was on the track. And that really is the Preakness, something for just about everybody.
While the Triple Crown hopes of Kentucky Derby winner Orb, who represents decades of involvement in the racing industry for the Phipps and Janney families, were dashed in the Preakness Stakes, another historic name landed in the winner's circle Saturday at Pimlico Race Course.
BALTIMORE – Trainer Eddie Plesa Jr. expressed satisfaction Sunday morning that his 3-year-old Itsmyluckyday bounced back from his 15th-place non-effort in the Kentucky Derby with a solid second-place finish in Saturday’s Preakness Stakes.
BALTIMORE — “I don’t wake up in the morning and say that I have to prove I can train a horse,” Wayne Lukas said at Pimlico Race Course on Saturday night.
But if the 77-year-old Hall of Famer still has full confidences in his abilities, most people would say that Lukas’s time has passed. More than 15 years have elapsed since he dominated American racing as no one ever had before. He revolutionized Thoroughbred training by being the first person to run a truly national operation and he smashed every significant record in his profession.
