Mike Kane | Horse Racing Free Tips

“He’s Here and He’s Ready;” Golden Pal Restarts Final Campaign in Friday’s Troy

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – Trainer Wesley Ward turned to football to explain why Golden Pal (Uncle Mo) has turned out to be what he has said is the best horse he has handled during his 32-year career.

“Look at all the special running backs in history,” Ward said. “What makes them so special? They are naturally blessed with talent is what it comes down to. They are extremely fast and a lot of them have the mind for it as well. He's got both.”

Nearly two months after a disappointing appearance as the favorite in the G1 King's Stand S. at Royal Ascot in June, Golden Pal returns to competition Friday in the GIII Troy S. presented by Horse Racing Ireland at Saratoga Race Course. He drew post five in the field of seven going 5 1/2 furlongs on the turf.

Golden Pal is two for two at Saratoga and has won six straight–all in stakes company–in the U.S. since dropping his maiden debut in April, 2020. Overall, he has won six of 10 starts and earned $1.4 million, second in the Ward stable career standings to Judy the Beauty (Ghostzapper).

“He's certainly extremely accomplished here, having won two Breeders' Cups and is shooting for his third,” Ward said. “The only thing he's lacking is over there. He hasn't really come through for me going overseas.”

In his second start as a 2-year-old, Golden Pal was second by a neck to The Lir Jet (Ire) (Prince of Lir {Ire}) in the G2 Norfolk S. at Royal Ascot. Last summer at York, he was seventh in the G1 Coolmore Wootton Bassett Nunthorpe S. On June 14 in the King's Stand, he got away slowly under Irad Ortiz, Jr., who had his head turned looking at a horse acting up behind the gate, was rushed up, weakened and was eased.

“This year I was just devastated with what happened at the break,” Ward said.

Golden Pal is the first foal out of Lady Shipman (Midshipman), who won 11 stakes during her distinguished career for Randall Lowe. During the height of her career, Lowe said he turned down a high offer of $3.5 million to sell Lady Shipman. He bred Golden Pal and when he failed to reach his reserve price at auction as a yearling, raced him as a 2-year-old. Following Golden Pal's victory in the GII Breeders' Cup Juvenile Turf Sprint, Lowe sold him to the Coolmore partnership of Mr. John Magnier, Michael Tabor, Derrick Smith and Westerberg Ltd., which kept him with Ward. The bay completed his 2021 campaign for his new owners with a 1 1/4-length score in the GI Breeders' Cup Turf Sprint at Del Mar.

Clearly, Golden Pal has become a Ward favorite.

“He's just such a joy to be around,” Ward said. “Every horse has a different personality, as people do. And this guy has just got a wonderful personality. He's always positive. He'd be a positive person if was a human. He's just a real cool guy to be around.”

Ward has been very careful with Golden Pal, balancing training with a light racing schedule throughout his career. He ran four times as a 2-year-old, another four times last year and will have four, possibly five, starts in this–his final–season on the track. Ward was especially enthusiastic about the way the colt performed in his debut this season, winning the GII Shakertown S. at Keeneland by 4 3/4 lengths Apr. 9.

Running away with the Shakertown in April | Coady

“It was a big race the spring,” Ward said. “He was only coming off a Breeders' Cup to Keeneland. We had to train him with the weather at Keeneland and take him up to Turfway and breeze him. He certainly wouldn't have been 100% going into the race fitness-wise, because we had to contend with the weather, but he just came on with just a powerful race. I was so looking forward to going over to Ascot with him as he just trained well from that point forward.”

Golden Pal has had three breezes at Saratoga, two of them bullets, over the Oklahoma turf training track since July 15.

“We've had ample spacing and he's here and he's ready,” Ward said.

In his two previous starts at Saratoga, Golden Pal was an easy and impressive winner. He broke his maiden by 3 1/2 lengths in the 2020 Skidmore S. when a return trip to Europe was scuttled due to weather. In 2021, he wowed the crowd on opening day with a 3-length victory in hand in the GIII Quick Call S.

From Saratoga, Golden Pal will return to Ward's home base at Keeneland to prepare for the Breeders' Cup. The prep in Kentucky could be an experiment, a surface change.

“We may go to the (GII Stoll Keenon Ogden) Phoenix, which is on the dirt, for stallion value,” Ward said. “We'll see if he can do it. There's no reason why he can't. In another trainer's barn he probably would have been a dirt horse, but he had a lot of physical issues along the way that kept me from running him on the dirt just to keep him sound.”

Golden Pal's only dirt start was in his first career race at Gulfstream Park.

While the Breeders' Cup is the career-ending target, Ward said one more race might be in the offing.

“It may or may not culminate in Australia,” Ward said. “It all depends on how we finish out the year, but Coolmore has expressed an interest in showcasing him for the breeders in Australia in the Southern Hemisphere.”

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With “No Real Soft Spots to Land,” Corniche Returns

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – Nearly nine months after his last race, champion and 'TDN Rising Star' Corniche (Quality Road) will return to competition Sunday, starting the late-developing next chapter in his thus-far unbeaten career with a big test in the GII Amsterdam S.

Corniche will again be carrying the white and red colors of his owner, Speedway Stables, the partnership of Peter Fluor and K.C. Weiner. Beyond that, pretty much everything else has changed since his 1 3/4-length victory in the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile Nov. 5 at Del Mar. Following the colt's long lay-up at WinStar Training Center, Fluor and Weiner announced May 2 that Corniche was being transferred from trainer Bob Baffert to Todd Pletcher. The switch was made, the co-owners said, because Baffert was serving a 90-day suspension and would be unable to prepare Corniche for a hoped-for start in June in advance of the big summer races for 3-year-olds, the GI Haskell S. and the GI Runhappy Travers S.

Starting with a three-furlong breeze June 10 at Belmont Park, Corniche has worked seven times for Pletcher. Under Luis Saez, who replaces Mike Smith, Corniche will make his 3-year-old debut in the 6 1/2-furlong Amsterdam. He drew post seven in the nine-horse field.

Pletcher has looked at videos of Corniche's breezes for Baffert and said he appears to be training the same.

“He's had a consistent work program for us,” Pletcher said. “He's not missed a beat since he came in and so, for a horse like that, that's kind of run through his conditions, there's no real soft spots to land coming back. We're starting back in a salty graded stake and hope he can continue to run as well as he has.”

Fluor and Weiner purchased the colt out of the Najran mare Wasted Tears for $1.5 million at the 2021 OBS April 2-year-old sale and turned him over to Baffert. Leading at every point, Corniche reeled off victories in a maiden at Del Mar, the GI American Pharoah S. at Santa Anita and the Juvenile back at Del Mar. Those three performances earned him the Eclipse Award as the champion 2-year-old male.

Corniche stayed on the farm and never emerged as a Triple Crown prospect. He recorded his first breeze at WinStar Apr. 15.

Corniche (inside) recently worked in company with Nest, winner of the July 23 GI Coaching Club American Oaks | Sarah Andrew

Last year, Pletcher picked up another Baffert trainee, the gifted 'TDN Rising Star' Life Is Good (Into Mischief), who has won seven of nine starts and is headed to the GI Whitney S. Aug. 6. Life Is Good debuted for Pletcher in the GI H. Allen Jerkens S., where he finished second by a neck to Jackie's Warrior (Maclean's Music). Pletcher said that Corniche might move on to the seven-furlong Jerkens Aug. 27.

“Could be, based on how this race goes,” he said. “That would be a logical next step should this go well.”

While Pletcher did not compare Corniche to Life is Good, he did note a link to another standout he handled, who began his career with another trainer.

“He reminds me more of his stallion Quality Road. He resembles Quality Road a bit,” Pletcher said. “This was where Quality Road made his first start for us, was in the Amsterdam. He set a track record that still stands.”

Quality Road, bred and owned by Edward P. Evans, had quarter crack issues while in the care of Jimmy Jerkens in 2009 and was subsequently moved to Pletcher.

The Amsterdam often is used as a prep for the Jerkens and Pletcher said the timing and the distance are the right combination for Corniche.

“He's proven versatile enough to win sprinting and going long,” Pletcher said. “We needed a place to come back and obviously the Curlin S. or the GII Jim Dandy S. at a mile and an eighth didn't really make sense. We felt like this race made the most sense.”

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From Turf Writer to Trainer: Gutierrez Writes His Own Story

DEL MAR, CA–It's fair to say that former turf writer Fausto Gutierrez does not fit the mold of a typical trainer at the Breeders' Cup World Championships.

While the background in media sets the outgoing 54-year-old Gutierrez apart, he is a veteran horseman with loads of experience and massive success in Mexico. His first starter in the Breeders' Cup is Letruska (Super Saver), the 5-year-old mare who is the 8-5 favorite on the morning line in the $2-million Distaff. Gutierrez has developed the Kentucky-bred for St George Stable LLC, owned by the Mexican billionaire Germán Larrea Mota-Velasco. She has won six of seven starts in 2021, four of them Grade Is, and is the leading contender to win the Eclipse Award as the older female dirt horse.

Gutierrez, the son of a now-retired lawyer, grew up in a family that was not connected to Thoroughbred racing.

“One of my first memories I have about horses was from the Hipódromo de la Zarzuela in Madrid, Spain,” he said. “We lived near there and when I was very, very young, sometimes we would go there.”

During his youth in Mexico City, Gutierrez said he became a fan of the sport at Hipódromo de Las Américas, the one track open in the country.

“I entered with the general public because I liked to see the horses go to the paddock, [handicap] the races, read in newspapers what's happening, who is winning, the selections,” he said. “This is one sport that can get your attention. It isn't important if your family is there. When you have the first contact with the horses, you want to smell all of what is around. And you recognize immediately, too, that the horses are athletes and this is another sport that is different from other ones, because there are human and equine athletes.”

Gutierrez went to college, majoring in communications, figuring that it would lead to a job in television or advertising. It delivered him to racing.

“I had a good friend who liked [soccer] and he started to work for the Periódico Reforma. It is one of the most important in Mexico,” he said. “When the newspaper started, he called me. We are very good friends from the university, we finished together, and he told me, 'I'm looking for a person to write about the horses.' A special [contributor], or something like that. I thought, 'Why not?'”

Gutierrez with Letruska this summer | Sarah Andrew

As he told the story a few feet from Letruska's stall at Del Mar, Gutierrez laughed about how an unplanned set of circumstances put him on what became his life's professional journey.

“This is the reason I started there,” he said. “At that point of my career, it determined things because if I don't find that job, for sure I had to go another way, maybe something in advertising. At that moment, I had a trainer's license and an owner with one or two horses. At the same time I was writing for the newspaper. This put me 100% into the Mexican racetrack and I had a chance to make a living.”

Gutierrez said he found his way into training in a most unusual way

“The first day I went to the university, my first class, I went with a book for a Mexican sale,” he said. “I put it under my seat and the professor said, 'What is this?' That professor was a partner in a horse that was at sale at that auction. After that he told me, 'Let's go on Saturday to the barn area.' I went with him and he introduced me to a trainer and we became friends. We claimed a horse together and I started to train him. It was a coincidence of life.”

Gutierrez said he believes the first winner he trained was in 1988 when he was 21 years old. About five years later, he was offered the turf writing job.

“When I started to work at the newspaper, I understood the real power of the media,” he said. “Whatever you write has more importance. This was the most important newspaper in Mexico. This helped me to know a lot of the owners and we became friends.”

In the early 1990s, Gutierrez was handling what turned into a career-influencing Kentucky-bred filly named Mactuta (Bates Motel) out of a Little Current mare, who he said won a dozen stakes and Mexican championships in 1993 and 1994.

When his newspaper career, which he said lasted for about 10 years, beckoned, Gutierrez found himself in the unusual situation of writing about some of his own horses. The connections he made with owners led to a foray into Texas racing.

“In 1996, the track was closed abruptly by the government because of the political situation,” he said. “It was supposed to close for one weekend, but it closed for three years. After eight months, we made a group of 24 horses from different owners and we sent them to Texas. We ran at Sam Houston, Lone Star and Retama and after the year of 1999, the track was ready to open again and I moved back to Mexico.”

Equibase stats show him with 20 victories from 182 starts in 1998 and 1999.

Quite by accident, in 2001, two years after returning to Mexico, Gutierrez developed a relationship with Larrea Mota-Velasco, the CEO of Mexico's largest mining corporation and a former horse owner.

“After 9/11, he was planning to come to Keeneland to buy some yearlings to go back into racing,” Gutierrez said. “He didn't fly because the airports were closed. He contacted me and asked me if I wanted to come. I took one of the first flights after they opened operations. After that, we have been together all this time.”

Letruska training at Del Mar | Breeders' Cup/Eclipse Sportswire

Larrea Mota-Velasco reinvested in bloodstock in a big way and Gutierrez handled his growing and increasingly powerful stable. It was so dominant, Gutierrez said, that he might saddle 11 of the 12 horses in a stakes race. He won 10 consecutive training titles at the Mexico City track from 2010-19 and twice won the Triple Crown.

Gutierrez found international success and U.S. exposure when the Clásico del Caribe series was relocated to Gulfstream Park in 2017. His victories included Jaguaryu (Mex) (Point Determined) in the 2017 Lady Caribbean; Jala Jala (Mex) (Point Determined) in the 2017 Caribbean Classic and 2018 Confraternity Caribbean Cup; Kukulkan (Mex) (Point Determined) in the 2018 Caribbean Classic and 2019 Copa Confraternidad del Caribe; and Letruska in the 2019 Copa Invitacional del Caribe, facing older males as a 3-year-old filly.

Larrea Mota-Velasco decided to open a U.S. division and Gutierrez and his family relocated to Florida.

“I moved here in March 2020 and really then I wasn't sure if I wanted to stay in the United States or not,” he said. “I was really planning to go back to Mexico. But after the pandemic, I'm staying here. A trip I had planned for 10 days I have extended until now.”

Letruska has carried Gutierrez's American stable, which has won 16 races with eight different horses this year. He said he has 15 horses based at Keeneland, likes the feel of a less-is-more business and hopes to grow a bit.

“Any trainer to continue to be competitive needs to have material, to have horses,” he said. “I want to have an operation that I can control very closely. Maybe I can have 30 to 40 horses that I can pay attention to. In Mexico before, I trained nearly 200 horses at the same time. It's different. At this point, I prefer to be closer to the horses and make more decisions.”

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Lexitonian’s Spa Challenge: Back-to-Back Victories

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y.–When he goes to the post Saturday for the GI Forego S., Lexitonian (Speightstown) will try to do something new: follow a win with a win.

Lexitonian picked up his fifth victory in 19 career starts July 31 in the GI Alfred G. Vanderbilt H. as the longest shot in the field of nine at 34-1 and paid $70. It was his second graded stakes win and pushed the Calumet Farm homebred's earnings to $687,682, but was it just a one-off at the historic Graveyard of Favorites?

Trainer Jack Sisterson figures that even with his Vanderbilt score, Lexitonian will be price once again in the seven-furlong $600,000 Forego.

“He's got to prove himself that he can produce another performance like he did a few weeks ago,” Sisterson said. “As a barn, as a whole, we think he can do that. And we were just happy that he was able to show the public that he was capable of winning a race of that caliber because he's had some near-misses before in some Grade Is with maybe not the luckiest trips in those races. It was nice to finally win a Grade I with him and show the public that he is capable of winning a race like that.”

Sisterson said that he wasn't surprised that Lexitonian–who was put into the race early by jockey Jose Lezcano–was able to win the six-furlong Vanderbilt against a gang of graded stakes-winning veterans.

“If you really diagnosis his form–I'm obviously going to be biased–he should be a multiple Grade I winner,” Sisterson said. “It's unfortunate that he just missed in the Bing Crosby last year. He had everything going against him. He scratched in the Vanderbilt last year. We shipped him across country within a few days to Del Mar and he ran a great second in the Bing Crosby, just got beat a nose. Then in the Churchill Downs [a GI on the May 1 Derby program], he's horse 12 of 12, he's wide the whole way, he presses fast fractions and gets beat a head there.”

Following the Churchill Downs, where Lexitonian was 46-1, Sisterson tried him in the GI Met Mile June 5. He had a troubled trip and was eased.

Lexitonian was sent back to Sisterston's base at Keeneland, where he worked four times before being shipped to Saratoga. He turned in a very sharp half-mile breeze over the main track, :47.01, fourth-fastest of 113 at the distance, the weekend before the Vanderbilt. Sisterson decided it was time to try some different tactics training his 5-year-old.

“He's a horse that is very workmanlike in the morning. He knows what his job is and he knows to show up in the afternoons,” Sisterson said. “We've been working him down on the inside just to get a little bit more pressure to try and get a little bit more out of his workouts. It was actually the luck of the draw that we drew the one-hole because we've been working down on the inside.”

Lexitonian won the Vanderbilt from the inside | Sarah Andrew

Sisterson said that he broke from his normal policy and gave Lezcano some instructions before the race.

“I said to Jose, 'let's really change it up here and be aggressive and send him from the one-hole. Hopefully, somebody goes and engages with you. We really think that Lexitonian is a horse that when he feels pressure he will engage and respond,'” Sisterson said. “And he did, everything, that and more. When he was headed, he fought back. It couldn't have worked out any better.”

Lezcano will be back up for the Forego and Sisterson said they will stay with what was a winning formula.

“We'll definitely do the same tactics there on Saturday, be aggressive, jump out, go forward with the intentions of making the lead and see how the race turns out,” Sisterson said. “If anyone else wants to go with us they are more than welcome to. If no one wants to, we'll jump out and see how we go.”

Lexitonian won't surprise anyone this time and he and Lezcano are likely to have plenty of company up front. If form holds, he won't get much respect from bettors. He has never been the favorite in any of his races and the average of his odds in the five wins is 17-1.

“Yeah, I think he's always going to be a price,” Sisterson said. “People may say that was a fluke. He's obviously got to back up a performance like that, which he's never really done.”

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