After a blissful week in England spent with family over Christmas, which was tremendous fun for all of us, but especially for Grace who got to hang out with her cousin Min, we hot-tailed it back to America and Maggie completed her final days at NYRA for 2017. I packed up the car and headed to Laurel to saddle Schivarelli in the Dave’s Friend Stakes. Sadly, I arrived at Laurel to find that racing had been canceled right as I had put the bridle on Schiv to lead him over. A couple of horses had stumbled after the wire and gone down on the racetrack. Though they had not got hurt and thank goodness all got up and walked off the track under their own will, management made the correct decision to cancel the rest of the card as it was clear there was a dead-patch on the track.
Schivarelli stayed at Laurel with my father-in-law, Howard Wolfendale – big, big thanks to him and his team for putting the horse up and training him as best they could under frigid temperatures for the week before the rescheduled Dave’s Friend Stakes took place. I was absolutely thrilled with Schivarelli’s effort against the extremely talented bunch of dirt sprinters that assembled. He went off 16-1 and ran in very, very good form. The two horses on the front went 22.40, 44.73, 56.39. When I saw the 44 fraction for the half-mile, I genuinely got excited as Schivarelli sat third behind the leaders. I thought those horses might stop, but they didn’t and ran a final time of 1:08.93, which in winter at Laurel is an incredibly good time. The winner of the race, Favorite Tale, was only beaten 1 ¾ lengths by Runhappy in the Breeders’ Cup sprint of 2015, so that says a lot about the level of competition in the race. Schivarelli returned home to Belmont and is safe and sound. That was the first leg of my journey on towards Fair Grounds.
With George as my sidekick and co-pilot, I spent the night with my in-laws before heading back out and driving a full day to Birmingham, AL. on New Year’s Eve. After that, another early start put me all the way to New Orleans by 10 o’clock in the morning, though not quite in time to pick Maggie and Grace up from the airport on New Year’s Day, and we are now all congregated in Louisiana. Maggie is working select weekends for NYRA from January through to March, which has afforded us to spend the winter months down here as a family. The arrangement is greatly appreciated as we look forward to spending time in a city that we really love.
We’ve had a quiet-ish start to the year with a couple of runners at the Fair Grounds, however, things will start to get hot with a couple of horses that I’m looking forward to seeing run. Cooptado, winner of the Tenacious Stakes last out on December 16, returned to face a much deeper field in the 1 1/16 mile Louisiana Stakes. A bit slow at the start and 5-wide rounding into the stretch, he finished 6th.
On Sunday I returned to New York to watch Climb the Ladder run at Aqueduct. She finished second after setting the pace for the first half of the 6 ½ furlong race on the dirt. Danny California (by Afleet Alex), who was looking to start this past weekend, will now run in a Maiden Special Weight going one mile on dirt this coming Thursday, January 18 – also at Aqueduct. Though it is rather frigid, it’s nice to be home to see how the New York division is coming along.
Lyrical Tale got her first opportunity to stretch out after having sprinted twice at Saratoga last summer. This daughter of Tale of the Cat owned by Merrylegs Farm is a half-sister to Thundering Sky and trains like a filly who will relish the step up in distance. Having had a two-year-old-in-training sale campaign straight into our New York division, Penny Hallman and I thought it prudent to give her a little time off in the fall before bringing her back with a view of getting one or two starts in her and hopefully breaking her maiden. Unfortunately, she had a bit of a rusty break and a bad bump at the start of her race on Monday, January 15. With no pace, she had very little chance to recover and finished 9th out of 12. Nonetheless, she’s been training extremely well and I am very much looking forward to seeing her continue to progress.
We have a couple of promising colts still in New York. Depending on how these next two pieces of work go, I’ll be looking at possibly running Westerdale in the Gr.3 Withers, as his two-year-old form worked out extremely well. Mask, the Tapit colt who beat us on October 20, returned to win the Mucho Macho Man Stakes at Gulfstream on January 6, while Navistar, the Union Rags colt who finished second, came out and broke his maiden at Gulfstream the other day. Westerdale’s three-year-old form looks rock-solid; hopefully he is fit and well after three weeks off in a field to do himself justice in the Withers.
