Nashville Derby: Owner chases 2nd big Kentucky Downs win

Trainer Mark Casse wasn’t looking beyond trying to get Tomasello his first stakes victory when he ran the colt in Ellis Park’s $250,000 Kentucky Downs Preview Nashville Derby.

“I was looking at it as, ‘Let’s try to win this race,’ ” Casse said. “Now, Harlan is a big dreamer, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Harlan is Harlan Malter, head of Ironhorse Racing Stable, which owns Tomasello with T-N-T Equine Holdings. Weeks before the Ellis Park race, Malter booked his hotel room in Franklin, Ky. He had his eye on a bigger prize, with the preview winner receiving a fees-paid spot in Kentucky Downs’s Grade 3, $3.5 million Nashville Derby Invitational on Saturday. Without a victory, Tomasello was unlikely to get an invitation to America’s richest turf race outside the Breeders’ Cup Turf and the most lucrative for 3-year-olds outside the Kentucky Derby.

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“I booked my hotel for that weekend back in July,” Malter said in a phone conversation. “That was 100% the target. He’s run very well, but he wasn’t going to get the invite without winning this race. We felt he deserved it, but you still have to have the credentials to do it.”

Tomasello and jockey Fernando De La Cruz did their part, stalking the pace before drawing off in the stretch for a 1 1/2-length victory while covering 1 1/8 miles over turf in a good 1:47. That earned him the right to take on Kentucky Derby starters and major prep winners Sandman, Burnham Square, Tiztastic and Final Gambit, along with the excellent turf 3-year-old Test Score and Britain’s Wimbledon Hawkeye in the capacity field of 12 3-year-olds.

Malter hopes he can double down on the biggest win of his ownership career, which happened when Get Smokin led all the way at 19-1 odds in taking the then-$1.7 million Kentucky Turf Cup (G2) in 2023. With De La Cruz riding Tomasello for the first time at Ellis Park, he brought the band back together. De La Cruz has been part of Ironhorse’s best horses, starting with the Tim Glyshaw-trained turf sprinter Buccharo, who earned his first of two victories in Keeneland’s Woodford Stakes in 2017.

“When Buccharo won his first Woodford at 26-1, I was like, ‘I better soak this in. This may be the only time I win a graded stakes,’” Malter said. “You win a $1.7 million race at Kentucky Downs, you think, ‘I better soak this in. It’s probably the last time I’ll run for this much money.’ I guess don’t doubt what can happen in horse racing, right?”

The front-running Get Smokin lost his Ellis Park prep, however, weakening to fourth at the end of the 1 1/4-mile race. Undeterred, Malter told Casse that he thought the 1 1/2-mile Kentucky Turf Cup would be right up Get Smokin’s alley.

“Mark likes to say he keeps the lights on the side of the runway to make sure I don’t fly off left or right," Malter said. "He says, 'As long as you’re somewhere inside those markers, Harlan, I’ll let you do what you want to do.’

“You don’t know until you try. I learned that with Get Smokin. We lost the 1 1/4-mile prep. People said, ‘If he couldn’t hang on at a mile-and-a-quarter, how’s he going to get a mile and a half?’ Mark was nice enough to admit that he thought I was totally crazy doing it.”

Tomasello’s only poor start was his first, sprinting on dirt. It took him four more starts, with a third and two wins, before winning on turf at Keeneland. He promptly followed that up with a nose allowance victory at Churchill Downs, then finished a good third in Churchill’s Audubon Stakes before the breakthrough race at Ellis Park. The Audubon winner, World Beater, went on to win the Saratoga Derby (G1), defeating Test Score. Tomasello finished second to World Beater’s third in his second-to-last maiden race.

Malter believes horses sired by 2020 horse of the year Authentic, winner of the Covid-delayed Kentucky Derby and the Breeders’ Cup Classic, make big improvements as they mature.

“We bought him out of the OBS April sale (for $125,000), a big good-looking horse,” he said. “We were just very patient. We always felt he was a two-turn horse. All of his losses are probably a little bit from maturity issues. He’s a very nice horse, getting better and better. This is going to be a tough race, but I think he’ll like it down there. He’s a real athlete.”

About the name: “When we went to name him, one of the people involved said, ‘Look, I had a friend who passed away and their last name was Tomasello. I’d really appreciate it if we could name it after that,’ ” Malter said. "I asked the T-N-T guys, and they were fantastic. They said, ‘Let’s do it.’ It’s also apparently a winery in New Jersey.”

As a Kentucky-bred, the Nashville Derby winner would earn about $2 million. Malter also has his eye on getting another one of Kentucky Downs’ signature trophies for graded-stakes winners: guitars signed by a country music artist.

“I’m very excited to try to get a guitar,” he said.