'Just a screwy year': Why Pneumatic is skipping the Kentucky Derby

A combination of factors led Pneumatic owner Winchell Thoroughbreds and trainer Steve Asmussen to decide to skip the 2020 Kentucky Derby.

Part of the reason is that the Uncle Mo colt had a "subpar work" about three or four weeks ago, said David Fiske, racing manager for Winchell Thoroughbreds.

That work came between his fourth-place finish in the June 20 Belmont Stakes and a score in the Pegasus Stakes on Saturday.

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Ahead of the Belmont, Fiske told Horse Racing Nation that connections would work back from the Kentucky Derby. But with "the scrambled stakes schedule this year," Fiske said, they had difficulties "trying to find a race at the right distance and the right time frame, and giving him an extra work and whatever. He could have maybe made the Ellis Park Derby, but we didn’t want to take him down there because of the probability of the heat in Western Kentucky, and he’s a big horse, and he would have had to ship from Saratoga. And we didn’t want to run in the Travers at a mile and a quarter.

"So it was just kind of a series of starts and stops and delays, kind of reroute," Fiske continued. "I think at one point we were thinking about the West Virginia Derby, and then that got canceled. It’s just a screwy year, it’s hard to get a series of races together, like I said, at the proper distance in the proper time frame."

So the plan — today, at least — is to train to the Oct. 3 Preakness Stakes without pursuing a Run for the Roses.

"I keep telling people, [the Kentucky Derby is] not plan A, B or C, but I’m not going to say 100 percent he won’t go because if my Twitter feed blows up and something happens to one of the horses — in parentheses, Tiz the Law — that might change our thinking a little bit. But he would have to do exceptionally well over the next couple of weeks, and then there would have to be, like I said, some major defections. So I think, probably 95 percent sure that he will train to the Preakness."

For now, Fiske said, Pneumatic is "back in his stall at Saratoga, and he’s happy, and we’ll just go from there.