Queen's Plate winner One Bad Boy to aim for Triple Crown
Trainer Richard Baltas originally scheduled One Bad Boy to ship back home to California following Woodbine’s $1 million Queen’s Plate. Then the son of Twirling Candy ran a big race on the front end of Saturday’s 1 1/4-mile Woodbine feature.
Baltas said connections are now game to give the rest of the Canadian Triple Crown series a try.
“Definitely, if we won the next one we would go for it,” he said Sunday.
The $400,000 Prince of Wales, run at 1 3/16 miles on the dirt at Fort Erie on July 23, is the middle leg before the $400,000 Breeders’ Stakes, at 1 1/2 miles on the turf back at Woodbine on Aug. 17 concludes the series.
“He’s always worked well on the dirt, and he ran second to Omaha Beach on the sloppy track that day,” Baltas said. “I think his best surface is the turf, to tell you the truth. He’s a very versatile horse.”
Sayjay Racing, Greg Hall and Brooke Hubbard’s One Bad Boy took blinkers off in the Queen’s Plate, just his fifth career start, and answered a major distance question under jockey Flavien Prat. Entering Saturday’s race, the ridgling had never gone farther than a mile.
“The last time we ran him at Golden Gate, he got beat as the favorite,” Baltas said, referring to the May 19 Alcatraz Stakes won by Visitant. “Flavien told me after the race, ‘Maybe I should just let him go.’ And then I was thinking about the mile and a quarter.
“A lot of times you put blinkers on horses because they’re young. So he was looking around a little bit when he was younger. I worked him a couple times without the blinkers and with a couple other horses, and he worked just dandy.”
Then it was a matter of relaxing.
From the No. 5 post in a field of 14, One Bad Boy led gate to wire, setting easy opening fractions of 24.42 and 49.52 seconds. Morning line favorite Avie’s Flatter ranged up outside of One Bay Boy leaving the turn, headed him and was then turned back by a 3 1/2-length winner.
“Just watching the replay again, I thought we were beat,” Baltas said. “But I knew he was going pretty easy, and I was just hoping he would kick on. When you see a good horse like that — when another horse comes and looks him in the eye — sometimes they re-break.”
One Bad Boy improved his record to 2-2-1 with earnings now of more than $523,000. He could multiply that bottom line in the coming weeks with the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation sponsoring a new $500,000 bonus for a Canadian Triple Crown sweep. Wando, in 2003, is the most-recent horse to pull off the feat and seventh since its inception in 1959.