The reason for the title of this blog is due to the fact that we just finished the Belmont Stakes in Saratoga for the last time. Being a traditionalist, I’m a big believer that things as sacred as the Triple Crown shouldn’t be altered. So I, for one, am incredibly excited to see Belmont reopen this September and welcome the Belmont Stakes home for the first time next year, followed by the Breeders’ Cup next autumn.
The asterisk comes alongside COVID and three years of the third leg of the Triple Crown being run in Saratoga. Take nothing away from the enormous success, the amazing job, the phenomenal production that the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival in Saratoga has been. It’s been a real joy to be a part of the quality of racing. The support from the Saratoga racing fans has been unbelievable, as expected it would be.
But, the Belmont belongs at Belmont, and it belongs at a mile and a half, and that is what the American Triple Crown is about. It’s not meant to be easy. It’s not meant to be commercial. It’s meant to be one of the true tests of a three-year-old thoroughbred around the world.
I spent the past week in the UK for our second crack at a win at Royal Ascot. We’ll start with More Champagne’s victory at Keeneland. This is a Golden Pal filly that we bought from Blue River Bloodstock at the OBS March sale, and we did something that I don’t typically do… bought a two-year-old straight in from an early two-year-old sale into training.
This filly has the most remarkable mind. She really doesn’t mind. Nothing phases her at all. And so after three strong pieces of work at Belmont, a grass race was available at the end of the Keeneland meet. We shipped her down to Kentucky seven weeks after we shipped her up from Florida, where she very impressively broke her maiden first time out by six lengths under John Velazquez.
We brought her back to New York and gave her time to fill herself up after the busy six or seven weeks that she’d just previously had, and we started getting some serious work into her. She flew to the UK a couple Mondays ago, arriving in the care of David Bradley and the National Stud in Newmarket, where she had an excellent week of training.
The final few training sessions went brilliantly for More Champagne, who shipped over to Ascot on the morning of the race. Sadly, she got a little lost in the middle of the race, took a couple of hefty bumps and was a disappointing mid pack finish. Really genuinely thought we were taking a filly with a real live chance, so the result was slightly frustrating.
It’s been a little bit of a hit-and-miss recently. We’ve had an awful lot of horses run incredibly well without winning. But we’ve also had some pretty impressive winners and some nail-biting finishes along the way. It was great to see Not This Time colt Glavine come back to the races and win in dominant fashion to break his maiden at Aqueduct under Johnny V.
This is a super talented colt who was a little green about his race in Saratoga where he hopped at the break, and that cost him any position going into the first turn. He ended up running a very creditable fourth in the Gr. 3 Pennine Ridge, but I do feel that if he hadn’t reacted to some noise in the gate and he’d broken cleanly, he probably would’ve won that race.
Irish Fortune gave Bill Martin and his partners a day they will never forget. On Friday of Belmont Stakes week, their little home bred by Central Banker absolutely pummeled a seven-furlong allowance field under Luis Saez, jumping out of the gate and never being seen again until the winner’s circle.
She’s incredibly game and tenacious and of course, only her trainer could mess that up by trying to run her on the grass once. By getting her back on the dirt, she found her footing, she found her distance, she found her love of being on the front end, and this was truly a day that I don’t think the Martins or their partners, family, and friends—many of whom were there and celebrated like they’d won the Acorn the race before—will ever forget.
It’s moments like these in the grandstand at Saratoga with a home bred for a group of people that I have known for a long time—indeed, we trained the dam Irish Whisper—make those occasions just a little bit more special.
A few of our horses were a little unlucky recently. Florida Patriot ran twice since my last blog and has been beaten both times. She’s been beaten a grand total of four inches in two races. This is truly a game of inches, and this little daughter of Vekoma has showed incredible pluck and determination being beaten by an older filly in both of her first two races.
On June 7, Morning Prayer ran into Casa Creed’s half-sister and, in a ding-dong battle the length of the Saratoga stretch, came out on the wrong side of that half a million dollar daughter of Curlin’s effort. This filly for Steven Rocco should be very competitive in the New York Stallion Series come August in Saratoga.
Luckily for Steve and I, Complex Agenda, a horse that we claimed at the last Saratoga meet, rewarded our patience and belief in him under a superb ride from Ricardo Santana, going wire-to-wire on closing day of this year’s Belmont Stakes Racing Festival up in Saratoga.
I want to give a special mention to A Bourbon for Toby in this blog. He didn’t win a race in this blog, but what he did was something rather remarkable. He ran twice in eight days in two different states and acquitted himself unbelievably well. If anything, he improved in the eight days, which is a very difficult thing for a horse to do.
Having finished third to Integration and beaten Grade One winner Carson’s Run at Aqueduct on the Thursday before the Preakness, Paul Farr and I decided that we would enter him in the Dinner Party Stakes to take a look at it. We sent him down to Laurel with a view that if nobody scratched, we might not run.
But I did say to Paul the horse seemed to be doing unbelievably well, and possibly we should take a chance on running as Paul owns the mare and valuable Black Type was at stake. Irad Ortiz took the leg up on A Bourbon for Toby in the Dinner Party, and he narrowly almost ran down Fort Washington.
The four-year-old son of Bernardini is going to get better and better with age, but he’s also a real character around the barn. He’s won at Keeneland already this year for us, ran second on Preakness Day, and I’m looking forward to a progressive four-year-old campaign with him.
We have a few other two-year-olds getting ready to run. River Of Deceit debuted this week for Titletown Racing Stables, finishing second with Junior Alvarado aboard. More to come in the weeks that follow.
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