Breeders' Cup Ladies' Classic Report - Nov 1
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Photo:
NYRA, Adam Coglianese
Awesome Feather – Stronach Stables’ unbeaten champion galloped 1 1/2m
on the main track for trainer Chad Brown on the eve of her run in the Ladies’
Classic.
The Awesome
of Course filly is 10-for-10 in a three-season career that has been interrupted
by a tendon injury in her left front leg. Brown said he is looking forward to
testing her against a stellar field that includes the unbeaten champion My Miss
Aurelia and last year’s winner Royal Delta.
“I feel very
good,” Brown said. “My filly has been training very well back home. She’s come
to Santa Anita, been on the track three days in a row, and every day she’s
looked dynamite out there. I’m optimistic that she’s going to come with a big
race.”
Awesome
Feather, her owners, and Brown have beaten some long odds to have the filly
successfully return to competition at the sport’s highest level.
“I’m happy to
be part of it,” Brown said. “She’s a special horse. She’s overcome a lot. Right
now, I think she is in the best shape of her career.”
Brown said
she is versatile enough to run the race whatever way it develops.
“The great
thing about her is that she has speed, she can carry it a long way, and she can
adapt to any situation,” Brown said. “If there is no speed in the race, she’s
the kind of horse that can go to the lead. She has no problem with that. If
there is a quick pace, she can stalk and rate kindly. I think she is posted
well (post 5). She should be able to work out a fair trip from there. We’ll see
how she goes from there.”
Brown said
the little filly has what it takes to be a standout, but that they aren’t
obvious to the naked eye.
“If we knew,
we’d be ‘gazillionaires’ picking horses out,” Brown said. “Sometimes horses
just have a certain level of natural talent and courage and competitiveness
that you can’t quantify. It’s hard to measure how much of it she has or where
it comes from. She’s just one of those rare horses that has it all.”
Brown has
been around a lot of nice horses as an assistant and since opening his own
stable in 2007, but Awesome Feather may be the most popular.
“She has a
huge fan base,” Brown said. “We get letters, horse treats and flowers all the
time. It’s nice that she has a following. She has terrific owners who have
always done the right thing by her and will continue to after she’s done
racing. It’s a great story. I’m very fortunate to have her in my barn. She’s
just a very, very rare horse. You can breed thousands of horses and not get one
like her.”
With her back
in the Breeders’ Cup two years after winning the Juvenile Fillies, Brown and
her owners have been rewarded for their patience.
“It’s been a
pleasure working with her,” he said. “It’s been frustrating at times not being
able to run her as many times as we’d like, but as far as working with her on a
daily basis, she’s been a pleasure to see every morning when you come to the
barn and she’s there.”
Class Included – “Is
she the best horse we have ever owned and bred? That would be an
understatement,” said Mike Feuerborn as he and his wife Amy watched Class
Included walk the shedrow after her Thursday morning exercise. “We raced her
mother (A Classic Life) and had a lot of fun with her, too.”
Amy said that she nicknamed A Classic Life “Classy” so the
moniker had already been taken when Class Included, who has been tagged with
“Blondie” since she was a foal, came along. Still, the couple’s first starter
in the Breeders’ Cup has plenty of quality in her own right.
“That’s for sure; big time. This one really is pretty
classy, and she fancies up even a little more when you put that purple
(Breeders’ Cup) saddle towel on her,” Amy said.
Kay Cooper, the daughter and assistant to trainer Jim
Penney, sent the winner of four consecutive stakes races out for a 1 1/2m
gallop on Thursday morning and planned to take her back to the paddock before
the fourth race this afternoon.
“We spent a lot of time schooling in the paddock yesterday
and it was a little chaotic because there were an awful lot of horses in
there,” she said. “But she performed very well and will school again.”
Penny, who has won more titles at the Washington tracks than any other trainer and is enshrined in that state’s Thoroughbred Hall of Fame, is semi-retired but will be here for the race.
Former Southern California-based jockey Jeff Cooper, Penny’s
grandson and Kay’s son, also will be in the entourage of more than 30 family
and friends flying in from the Northwest.
Grace Hall – No
matter how she fares on Friday, the Ladies’ Classic will be bittersweet for
everyone affiliated with the barn of trainer Tony Dutrow. The multiple graded
stakes-winning Grace Hall will leave after the race and be shipped to Kentucky
where she is consigned through the ring at the Fasig-Tipton November sale on
Monday.
“I hope that whoever buys her will send her back to us,”
said Carol Fisher, the assistant to Dutrow, after she galloped the 3yo filly 1m
and jogged her the same distance on Thursday morning.
Fisher, who flew on the last plane out of New York with
Grace Hall, has worked the 2011 Juvenile Fillies runner-up and taken care of
her since she arrived in the Dutrow barn as an unraced 2yo and is very attached
to her.
“We’ve gone everywhere together. She’s grown up a lot since
she raced in the Juvenile Fillies and has gained a lot of muscle and is a lot
more lean,” Fisher said. “This morning she was happy to get out on the track
(for the first time). She handled it beautifully and wasn’t even blowing
afterward.”
Dutrow and his wife, Kim, were headed to Los Angeles on
Thursday on a private plane arranged by retired National Hockey League right
wing Keith Jones, who is currently an NBC Sports Network NHL studio analyst and
the color man on the Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia broadcasts of the
Philadelphia Flyers. Jones owns horses trained by Dutrow, but is not involved
in the ownership of Grace Hall.
“Tony and Kim were stuck because of the hurricane. They
still couldn’t get on a commercial flight. They don’t even have power at their
home (in New Town, Pa.) yet,” said Fisher. “Keith used his connections to get
them hooked up because it was the only way they could get here.”
Include Me Out – Jay
Em Ess Stable owner Samantha Siegel watched intently from trackside as trainer
Ron Ellis led Include Me Out to the gate on the Santa Anita main track Thursday
morning before the 4yo filly jogged 1 1/4m under exercise rider Manny Rotella.
“She's a pro; she's been here before," said Siegel of the filly who was shipped across town from Betfair Hollywood Park Tuesday following a Monday work.
Include Me Out has won three of six starts on the Santa
Anita main track, including the Santa Margarita Stakes in March.
Asked if she thought Include Me Out's best effort was good
enough to win in a stellar lineup, Siegel replied, “I think they're all going
to have to bring their ‘A’ games. You don't get too many eight-horse fields
with seven grade I winners and two unbeaten horses.”
Love and Pride – Trainer
Todd Pletcher was on hand to supervise the Thursday morning gallop of the Green
Hills Farm’s Ladies’ Classic contender at Santa Anita after arriving from New
York the previous afternoon.
Pletcher said he believes the Ladies Classic’ is perhaps the
most contentious of all the races on the two days of Cup racing.
“It’s a very tough race, as deep as any of them,” he said.
“We’re hoping that Love and Pride having raced over the track and being here
for three works over the track creates some sort of an advantage for her. Her
last two races were very impressive. She beat Royal Delta and It’s Tricky in the
Personal Ensign at Saratoga.”
Before that race, Love and Pride was an uneventful fourth in
the Delaware Handicap, so Pletcher decided to make an equipment change. Off
came the blinkers that had been used most of her career, and the next two
starts were perhaps her two most impressive victories.
“It was more of an experiment,” said Pletcher, who then
decided to send the A.P. Indy filly to California for the Sept. 29 Zenyatta
Stakes after the Personal Ensign.
“The main reason was
that we felt she was a two-turn filly, and to stay home and run in the Beldame
at one turn was going to be a disadvantage for her. We were hoping that coming
here early, running around two turns and getting to stay here, might create an
advantage for her.”
Love and Pride, winner of four of her eight starts this
season, will get back regular rider John Velazquez for this race. Local jockey
Martin Garcia rode her in the Zenyatta.
My Miss Aurelia – Last
year’s champion 2yo filly had a routine gallop over Santa Anita’s main track
Thursday morning as she prepares for her second straight Breeders’ Cup
appearance.
“I really love this filly and how she’s doing, but I have nothing but respect for everyone else in the field,” trainer Steve Asmussen said. “It’s the type of race you could run 10 times and get 10 different outcomes because they’re all that good.”
Questing – Godolphin
Racing’s Questing galloped 1 1/2m under exercise rider Javier Fragoso at Santa
Anita Thursday morning before standing in the starting gate.
Trainer Kiaran McLaughlin left no mystery about race
strategy for Questing
“We’re going. We’re going to the lead,” McLaughlin said.
“We’re going let her go and hope Todd (Pletcher, trainer of Love and Pride)
lays second, lapped on us, but we’re not going too fast.”
Questing won the Coaching Club American Oaks and Alabama
Stakes in front-running style.
“She’s better that way. She’s free-running,” McLaughlin
said. “She pulls hard if she’s not (on the lead). She’s going to be close if
not on the lead.”
Royal Delta – Trainer Bill Mott’s defending champion galloped 1
3/8m Thursday morning on the main track.
Mott could
set two records if the Besilu Stables’ star repeats in the Ladies’ Classic: a
third straight victory in the Ladies’ Classic and a fifth overall victory in
the race. He won with Ajina in 1997 and Escena in 1998 and Unrivaled Belle in
2010.
This year’s
field may be the deepest in history. In addition to Royal Delta, the race
includes two unbeaten champions, My Miss Aurelia and Awesome Feather, and the
standouts Grace Hall, Class Included, Questing, Include Me Out, and Love and Pride.
“I think
it’s very competitive,” Mott said. “You have to respect a lot of the horses in
there. It looks like a good, fast pace. And it looks like some horses have
speed and good quality. There is no shortage of talent.”
Mott trained
Royal Delta’s granddam and dam, and developed Royal Delta into a superstar in
2011 for breeder-owner Prince Saud bin Khaled, a longtime client. However, the
prince died in February 2011, and his racing stable was sold to settle his
estate. Royal Delta went to auction the week following her victory in the 2011
Ladies’ Classic.
Benjiman
Leon purchased the filly for $8.5 million and said he intended to race her in
2012. At that point, all Mott knew was that the talented 3yo filly was gone.
“I had no
expectations of getting her back,” he said. “It was a sad day when I had to
walk her out of my barn down to that van and send her to Keeneland. It was a
little bit like I was walking to my best friend’s funeral.
“Then I got
over to the sale and I guess I got over it. I hung around the sale and
everybody was looking at her and I was there when she went through the ring.
Actually it
was quite exciting, knowing that I had been part of it, and I didn’t know what
was going to happen, who was going to get her, but the more I thought about it,
I said, ‘she has been good to us.’”
Mott said he
bumped into Leon after the filly was purchased and congratulated him on the
buy. He said that Leon asked him to call in a week or two.
“I still
didn’t know,” Mott said. “She was at the farm and he (Leon) invited me down. I
was going through Ocala and stopped in. At that point, I still didn’t know if I
was going to get her. He was laughing at me and said, ‘We are going to give her
to you to train.’
It was nice.
It was great.”
Royal Delta
has a 3-2-0 record in six starts for Mott this year and is scheduled to remain
in training in 2013.
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