Nutella Fella will miss Champagne with bruised foot

Nutella Fella, surprise winner of the Grade 1 Hopeful, will not be able to compete in the Champagne Stakes on Saturday at Aqueduct because of a bruised left hind foot, trainer Gary Contessa told Horse Racing Nation on Wednesday.

Contessa discovered the problem during a routine check of his horses after they trained on Tuesday. “It’s just bad timing,” he said. “I thought maybe there was a chance that by today he would look a whole lot better and he is. He’s 75 percent today. But I can’t, in good conscience, run him on Saturday.”

Contessa went on, “If this had happened a week ago, we probably wouldn’t even be talking about this. But it happened yesterday. In the normal course of checking the horses after they train, I felt a little bit of heat in the foot.”

The veteran conditioner said it is “impossible to tell” whether the son of Runhappy can overcome this setback in time to run in the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Juvenile on Nov. 3 at Santa Anita.

“We take the Champagne off the table and see how long it takes us to fix the foot, and maybe we go to the Breeders’ Cup and maybe we decide not to,” he said. “It all depends on how long it takes to heal.”

Contessa is heartened by the progress he and his staff already have made in dealing with the bruised foot. “I don’t have a major problem. I have a minor problem,” he emphasized. “It’s a nuisance.”

Nutella Fella, a $12,000 yearling purchase for Bell Gable Stable, created a feel-good finish to a Saratoga meet marred by a series of equine fatalities when he pulled a major upset by winning the Sept. 4 Hopeful (G1) at 54-1.

With jockey Junior Alvarado aboard, he turned back favored Timberlake, a $350,000 yearling, by 1 1/2 lengths as the second-longest shot in a field of 10 in the final Grade 1 of the 40-day stand. The husband-and-wife team of Nick and Delora Beaver, whose Bell Gable Stable was the leading owner at Delaware Park in 2021 and 2022, had never won a graded stakes before the Hopeful.

Nutella Fella is 2-for-2, having broken his maiden in a 5 1/2-furlong contest on July 26 at Delaware Park. Contessa had high hopes for the Champagne until this negative turn.

“It makes everybody feel crappy,” he said.