A year ago, the joint was jumpin’.
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The silver-haired conditioner reported the Tapit colt came out of the Belmont well-“I was kinda surprised by his energy level”-and will depart from New York June 13 for some time off at WinStar near Versailles, Ky”. We ran into American Pharoah, so this is a huge performance here today. A packed house of 90,000 jubilant fans stood and roared. Savoring a Belmont Stakes triumph the morning after was a taste of paradise.
To win the 148th running of the Belmont Stakes, Creator and Irad Ortiz, Jr. would need the ideal trip to run down a very game Destin who took the lead with just over a quarter of a mile to go. If all goes well, Exaggerator will run in the Grade II, $600,000 Jim Dandy on July 30 and then in the Travers.
Then again, every year can’t be Triple time because as trainer Dale Romans says, “then it wouldn’t be special and it wouldn’t get all the hype to go along with it”.
The excitement surrounding the race was subdued without Nyquist, who won this year’s Kentucky Derby.
“We’ve got to have these years where we don’t have the Triple Crown on the line”, he said, “where we still have a great race and we have a great card”. “I know he’s going to WinStar for a freshening and it will be Elliott’s decision what he does after that”.
Here’s a collection of some of the biggest stories in horse racing, all in one place. Two weeks later, he ended a personal 0-4 record against undefeated Nyquist with a 3 1/2-length win in the Preakness, also in the slop.
Owned by WinStar Farm and celebrity chef Bobby Flay, Creator became the 17th non-favorite to win the Belmont in the last 20 years.
Destin, the Tampa Bay Derby victor ridden by Javier Castellano, took advantage of being the best of the stalking types in the field to finish second. As they turned into the stretch, Creator appeared to be caught behind a wall of horses, with nowhere to run.
Possibly the best era the track enjoyed as far as the jockey colony is concerned was the 1970s with the likes of Sandy Hawley, Avelino Gomez, Jeff Fell, Robin Platts, and Lloyd Duffy battling it out on the track.
But though the Creator team insisted Gettysburg was not there to act as a rabbit, he was the only obvious front-runner in the race, and so it proved as he led Destin around the wide Belmont oval.
Going back to the beginning at Churchill Downs, everything looked to be on course for another historic Triple Crown when Nyquist captured the Kentucky Derby to remain undefeated, while scoring his fifth grade I victory, a remarkable achievement. Even for a Hall of Famer who has trained more than 7,300 winners, his first score in “The Test of the Champion” was an overpowering rush. “I mean, from our stable’s perspective, I did not feel like running Gettysburg was in my two horses’ best interests and I had an obligation to those owners”.
“I was hoping to dispel the sloppy-track thing, but you know that’s got to come into play as well”, said Keith Desormeaux, Kent’s brother and the trainer of Exaggerator. “Maybe they like the name”.
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So, they do the only thing possible. The Japanese training methods may amuse and bewilder us, but whatever they are doing, it is working. Moved to the United States by Khalid Abdullah’s Juddmonte Farms to be based with Brown this year, Flintshire delivered a scintillating performance Saturday while making his first start since December 13, winning the Grade 1 Manhattan Stakes by 1 3/4 lengths. “It was a gallop to the half-mile pole”.
