Casse Excited About Current Juvenile Class

On Friday, Norman Casse, assistant trainer to his father Mark, discussed how the September Meet is an opportunity to get some of his 2-year-olds going. That afternoon, the Casse barn sent out Conquest Stables LLC’s Conquest Big E and John C. Oxley’s Gametown in the fifth and seventh races, respectively. While both 2-year-olds could do no better than second, Mark has not lost any confidence in what he believes could be some of the best 2-year-olds in his Churchill stable.

 

“I thought they both ran real well,” Norman Casse said. “The first horse [Conquest Big E] did everything wrong and still barely got beat so he ran really well. He’s a bit of a troublemaker, that’s one of the reasons why we didn’t run him at Saratoga. He was probably ready to run at Saratoga, but we decided not to, just for what you saw (Friday). The other horse, Gametown, I was a little disappointed in, but he ran one time on the grass and (Friday)’s race was decent.”

 

Casse said that he felt as if Gametown had a difficult time handling the track, and elaborated a bit on some of the difficulties training Conquest Big E at Saratoga this summer.

 

“I think that he [Gametown] struggled with the track a little bit – so did Shaun [Bridgmohan],” he said. “As crazy as it may seem, I think that he could be a better horse for the turf. Conquest Big E could be a real good horse, too. We had a real tough time with him at Saratoga. It took us forever to get him okay out of the gate. He rears up and he did that (Friday) so that really wasn’t a huge surprise for us. He was also in the one hole which didn’t help him anymore. We’ll probably go to Keeneland with these two. Spinning them back for another race this meet would be too much on them.”

 

Mark Casse reiterated some of his son’s statements from Friday morning regarding training their 2-year-olds for the September Meet.

 

“We find that we’ve used this meet as a good place where they can start stretching out which is nice,” Mark Casse said. “Most of us aim to be here on the first Saturday in May so this is a great place to try and do that.”

 

Casse also gave an update on this year’s Stephen Foster (GI) winner Noble Bird, stating that he will be out for the year and will resume training at the beginning of next year. Last time out, the son of Birdstone was a well-beaten ninth in the Whitney Handicap (GI) at Saratoga last month.

 

“He came out of that race pretty banged up,” he said. “We knew when we started backing up at the half-mile pole that something was wrong because that was not like him. We never really could figure out what was bothering him, but when we tried training him again he just wasn’t himself so we sent him to Ocala and they worked on him last week. He did something to his left hip. They can’t really x-ray their hip so it’s hard to say whether it’s just a muscle tear of some sort, but he’ll be fine. I would say our long term goal would be next year’s Stephen Foster. He probably won’t start back training until the beginning of next year.”