Pavel wins Stephen Foster Handicap, Breeders' Cup-bound
Hours before Saturday’s Stephen Foster Handicap, Triple Crown winner Justify paraded over a Churchill Downs track where he could look for a racing “Grand Slam” later this year in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.
At least one rival has emerged, with Pavel a 6-1 upset winner of the Grade 1, $500,000 feature on the “Downs After Dark” card. Showing a nice turn of foot under jockey Mario Gutierrez, the 4-year-old son of Creative Cause powered off the turn and to a 3 3/4-length victory in the year’s first “Win and You’re In” event toward the Nov. 3 Classic.
"I think he was just feeling it tonight," said trainer Doug O'Neill, whose other previous Grade 1 wins at Churchill came in the 2012 and 2016 Kentucky Derbys. "He always kind of gets a little worked up. In the past we've schooled him. We've tried to calm him down, and we realized, why don't we just let him be him -- be himself."
With owner Reddam Racing and Gutierrez, Pavel shares the same connections as O'Neill's Derby winners, I'll Have Another and Nyquist, and could establish similar prestige in a handicap division that so far feels wide open.
Pavel covered nine furlongs in 1:49.21 and in the process lived up to some early career potential. He ran fourth in his second start last year, Saratoga’s Jim Dandy (G2), then won the Smarty Jones (G3) third out.
"He’s been training really well into this race so I was confident he’d run well," Gutierrez said. "When we turned for home I could feel like I had a lot of horse underneath me still. It was a great feeling and he won very easily under his own. I knew this horse could be better than his last couple of races and he had some bad luck. He overcame that tonight.”
Six of Pavel’s next seven starts were at the Grade 1 level, and he was only once on the board. Whether he’s an improving horse or this was a weak Stephen Foster field remains to be seen, but hopes were high for odds-on favorite Backyard Heaven, who sat just off the pace but failed to fire in the stretch.
"I thought when the favorite pulled away from us, 'Uh oh, we can still run second,'" O'Neill said, as Backyard Heaven moved past pace setting Uncle Mojo entering the turn.
But Pavel ate up ground off the rail and surged down the center of the track in the stretch, set up by Uncle Mojo's opening fractions of 23.58 seconds for the quarter mile and 47.25 for the half.
"The way he mowed him down was incredible," O'Neill added.
Pavel returned $15.60 to win in the Foster.
"I see myself nudging up to some adult beverage tonight then thinking about where we go next," O'Neill said. "We were very optimistic with him all along and to see him put it together was great. We went through a bit of a funky phase with him and had some traffic troubles in his last couple of races.”