Pegasus Turf: Maker hopes Atone rediscovers winning form

Hallandale Beach, Fla.

If the winner of a Grade 1 race comes back to defend the next year but shows up at 20-1 on the morning line, visions of flukiness dance are bound to dance in the horseplayer’s head.

Maybe not so for Atone. He was only 7-2 when he won last year in the Pegasus World Cup Turf Invitational.

“He’s always been a very forward horse,” his trainer Mike Maker said Friday at Gulfstream Park on the eve of Pegasus Turf 2024. “He trains great, but I think this year’s field is a lot deeper than last year’s.”

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True enough. There is the presence of retiring 4-year-old filly Warm Heart, the Breeders’ Cup Turf runner-up who came over again from Ireland to face males and try and punctuate her résumé with a third top-level victory. Throw 3-for-3 colt Integration into the 12-horse mix, and the field already looks better than it did when Atone won, and Grade 2 winner City Man went off as the favorite only to finish last.

There is also the not so small matter that Atone, a 7-year-old gelding, has finished in the money only once since that triumph last January made him a millionaire.

“I think he just needs to step it up,” Maker said. “But that’s turf racing. He’s had rough trips, etc., etc. He got sick in the spring. He wasn’t quite the same horse, but he’s as good as he’s ever been now.”

A son of Into Mischief, Atone was bred and campaigned by Godolphin via trainers Tom Albertrani and Eoin Harty. Sold to current owner Kirk Wycoff’s Three Diamonds Farm for $130,000 at a Fasig-Tipton sale in July 2021, Atone was gelded and sent to Maker, who has kept him in mostly in graded-stakes company since.

Fourth in the 2022 Pegasus Turf, Atone rewarded Maker’s patience with last year’s performance that produced his only stakes victory in 13 tries.

Breaking from post 1, Atone gets Oisín Murphy as his seventh different rider in the last eight races. In last year’s Pegasus Turf he came out of post 3 with Irad Ortiz Jr., who raced him in mid-pack early before making a wide, closing move in the homestretch to win the 1 1/8-mile race.

“He settled in nice, saved some ground and got lucky to get some racing room when it counted,” Maker said at the time.

As for this time?

“I’d like to see a lively pace,” Maker said, adding with a laugh that his instructions to Murphy would be “to hit the wire first.”

After a 20 percent chance of morning showers, the National Weather Service forecast is for a sunny, 81-degree day at Gulfstream Park with a high near 81 degrees and a homestretch headwind from the southeast of 9-15 mph with gusts to 21.

That means the course should be firm as it was last year for the Pegasus Turf, race 12 of 13 at a scheduled post time of 4:55 p.m. EST.