Dublin Fires Derby Bullet

Dublin worked a bullet five furlongs in :59.20 after the renovation break Monday morning with jockey Terry Thompson up.

Working in company with Buzzin and Dreamin, Dublin broke off about a length and a half behind his workmate, passed Buzzin and Dreamin on the far turn and finished 13-14 lengths ahead at the wire. Clockers caught Dublin in fractions of :11.80, :23.20, :35.20, :47.20 with a six-furlong gallop out time of 1:13.20.

“I’m going to need a faster rabbit,” four-time Kentucky Derby-winning trainer D. Wayne Lukas said after the work. “I thought it was an excellent work. I liked the way he did it. It was a little quick. It is hard to say it was in company; it was almost a solo work.

“The first work here, it is the energy that you want to see and I saw that today. I think he really fits. I like him as well as any of them I’ve had.”

Thompson, who never has ridden in the Kentucky Derby, liked the work.

“We were shooting for :59,” Thompson said. “He passed his company early. We were hoping to get to the head of the stretch, but Dublin passed him early and I let him go on so we could get close to what Wayne wanted.”

Thompson almost had a Kentucky Derby start in 2003.

“I was 24 hours from the gate,” said Thompson, who had won the Arkansas Derby on Sir Cherokee. “It was probably the biggest low for me to hear that he hurt his leg (fractured right hind). I went from the biggest high to the biggest low.”

Thompson rode Dublin to a runner-up finish in the Southwest (GIII) in February and a third-place finish in the Arkansas Derby (GI).

“I think Terry is riding as well as anybody in the nation right now and he has great chemistry with the horse,” Lukas said. “We had made a change of riders, but it didn’t work and we had the sense to switch back. If it wasn’t broken, it shouldn’t have been fixed.”