Longshot Bullards Alley upsets the Canadian International
On a windy and rainy Sunday at Woodbine, the longest shot on the board, Bullards Alley crushed a field of 10 runners from all over the world in the Grade 1, $800,000 Pattison Canadian International on the mile and a half turf course listed as soft by the time the race went off at 6:10pm ET.
Bullards Alley, sent postward at odds of 42-1, made a wide sweeping move around the final turn with Eurico Da Silva riding to win by 10 3/4 lengths.
The victory by Bullards Alley snapped a seven-race winning streak in the International by European horses. The last North American winner came in 2009, when Hall of Famer Bobby Frankel won the race with Champs Elysees in what turned out to be the final grade one victory of the trainer's career.
Trainer Tim Glynshaw, who scored his first career Grade 1 victory, said, “He ran the best race of his life in the graded stake at Churchill on a yielding turf course, so we knew he liked it, but so did the Europeans and a lot of others in the field. I think today he just got that first jump on them. Sometimes they stay off you when you’re a longshot like that, and it was just too late for them.”
The soft turf course produced very slow times as Messi jumped out of the gate to take the role as pacesetter. He opened up a length on Postulation and Johnny Bear and those three stayed in position for the first six furlongs while going 26.58, 52.51, and 1:18.98.
Turning for home the only horse that was making a move was Bullards Alley, and he exploded past the rest of the field, continuing to widen his lead. The final time for Sunday's soggy twelve furlongs was 2:34.37.
Bullards Alley had not won a race since the Louisville Handicap (G3) in May of 2016. Recently, the gelding had run at six different tracks in as many starts with his best finish a neck loss at Woodbine.
“He barely got beat, and that’s one of the reasons we decided to bring him back, because he seems to like this course a lot,” Glynshaw said. “At Arlington he had a horse at the 5/8 pole make a right-hand turn right in front of him. He was going to be competitive in that race. Then at Kentucky Downs the last race, the turf was just too hard for him.”
The winner produced gaudy across the board prices of $87.90, $25.50, and $10.90. The $2 exacta, which was made up of two horses that made their last start in the Sept. 9 Kentucky Turf Cup at Kentucky Downs, paid $645.80 with second place finisher being Oscar Nominated. The $2 trifecta down to Flamboyant returned $5,098.80.
The best finish by the Europeans came from the 2.30-1 race favorite, Idaho, who managed to get up for fourth.
This marked, by far, the largest payout in Bullards Alley's career. His record now stands at 35: 6-4-6 with earnings of $1,099,304.