Preakness 2024: Mystik Dan has his last gallop before the race
Baltimore
The next time Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan goes out on the main track at Pimlico will be Saturday evening, when it will be a lot noisier for Preakness 2024 than it was for his Friday morning track work.
“He galloped a mile-and-a-quarter today,” his trainer Kenny McPeek said. “Just a light gallop. He didn’t need anything complicated. He backed into the seven (eighths pole) and turned back to the five.”
That was with exercise rider and retired jockey Robby Albarado just after 7 a.m. EDT, about 36 hours before Mystik Dan will try to keep alive the dream of becoming the 14th horse to win the Triple Crown.
Instead of a cool, calm, cloudy morning, the conditions are expected to be markedly different come post time. Weather forecasts say it will be a rainy day and, therefore, a sloppy track.
“I really don’t have any concern,” McPeek said. “Maybe it hurts the other horses. I don’t know. I don’t worry about anything I can’t control.”
As impressive as he and jockey Brian Hernandez Jr. were in their rail trip to the Kentucky Derby victory 13 days ago, Mystik Dan had his most dominant performance Feb. 3 in the mud at Oaklawn. That was where he trailed by as many as five lengths in mid-pack before Hernandez, again on the inside, ran off to an eight-length triumph in the Grade 3 Southwest Stakes.
Wet or dry, Mystik Dan has passed rivals in all three of his races this year.
“You can’t really tell the difference,” Hernandez told the Maryland Jockey Club. “He’s one of those horses where he’s got two, three different moves, and he’s got a quick turn of foot. That day in the Southwest it was sloppy, and he bounced over it really, really good. But he’s gotten over the dry, fast, main tracks as well. So if it rains, it rains. If it doesn’t, we’re ready to go either way.”
After his gallop, Mystik Dan got the obligatory bath from assistant trainer Ray Bryner before he was walked over to the lawn strip in front of the stakes barn. He looked quite content devouring the grass beneath him.
“Nothing fazes him,” McPeek said. “He’s easy to be around. I think he’s bomb-proof.”
Mystik Dan, a Goldencents colt owned by Lance Gasaway, 4 G Racing, Daniel Hamby and Valley View Farm, was the 3-1 favorite around midday EDT on Friday in early pari-mutuel betting for the Preakness.