Deep Bunch Set for Mineshaft

Even with local heavyweights Mandaloun (Into Mischief) and Midnight Bourbon (Tiznow) awaiting the $20-million Saudi Cup, there will still be plenty of talent on display in a loaded renewal of Saturday's GIII Mineshaft S. at Fair Grounds.

Miles D (Curlin), third at 18-1 in the GI Runhappy Travers S. last summer, closed out his sophomore campaign with a pair of wins, led by a promising decision in Aqueduct's 1 1/8-mile Discovery S. last time Nov. 27. The runner-up that day Speaker's Corner (Street Sense) resurfaced with a razor sharp win in the GIII Fred W. Hooper S. Jan. 29. Miles D completed his preparations for the Mineshaft with a four-furlong move in :48 3/5 (2/41) at Payson Park Feb. 12.

“This horse has done well,” trainer Chad Brown said. “He ran late in the year over at Aqueduct and put up a very nice win against a very talented horse [Speaker's Corner]. He's wintered well and now it's time to get his 4-year old season started. The race came up deeper than I thought it would. He's going to really have to fire off the layoff to beat these horses.”

Olympiad (Speightstown) looks primed for a career best following an eye-catching 7 1/4-length optional claiming victory for Hall of Famer Bill Mott in his two-turn debut at Gulfstream Jan. 15. The 3-1 Mineshaft morning-line favorite was previously a troubled fourth while making his stakes debut in a salty GI Cigar Mile H. Dec. 4.

Sidelined following a well-beaten eighth in the GII Toyota Blue Grass S. Apr. 3, Untreated (Nyquist) has been perfect since returning to action, pairing up strong wins going a one-turn mile at Aqueduct Nov. 19 and Dec. 31, respectively.

Last term's GI Kentucky Derby fifth-place finisher and GIII Matt Winn S. runner-up O Besos (Orb) brings a three-for-five record at Fair Grounds to the table, including a narrow win off the bench in an optional claimer Jan. 2.

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Foley Considering Shorter Distances With Comeback Allowance Winner O Besos

The fifth place finisher in the 2021 Kentucky Derby, Bernard Racing, Tagg Team Racing, West Point Thoroughbreds, and Terry Stephens' O Besos made his much-anticipated return count on Sunday. The 4-year-old by Orb won the Fair Grounds' seventh race, a $47,000 allowance option claiming contest, by a hard-fought nose over Intrepid Heart.

“He had to run a little harder than we were hoping for,” trainer Greg Foley said. “He got banged around a little out of the gate. I don't know how much he loved it on the inside there.”

Now 8-3-1-1 with earnings of $320,224, all three of O Besos' wins have come at Fair Grounds with Brian Hernandez Jr. riding.

“We got that under his belt,” Foley said. “He looked great this morning, licked his tub, he didn't act like it took anything out of him. The horse looks amazing. He's put on 150 pounds of muscle in the right places. I couldn't be any happier with the way he looks.”

After the Kentucky Derby, O Besos ran second in the Matt Winn (G3) at Churchill Downs on May 29, 2021. Winning at 1 1/16 miles off the bench on Sunday, his connections are now considering their options for his next start.

“I just got to figure out what this horse really wants to do,” Foley said. “I'm not so sure he is a true long-distance horse. He might be a monster going seven-eighths or a one-turn mile.”

Speaking of past Kentucky Derby horses, Foley and his team are also weighing their options for Lloyd Madison Farms, IV's Major Fed, who was last seen finishing fifth in the locally run Tenacious Stakes the day after Christmas.

“Might be the same speech,” Foley said. “He could be great at one-turn. Other than that, all his brothers and sisters were really good turf horses, too, so we might stick him on the grass next time.”

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Like Her Trainer, Sconsin Closing with Every Stride

After 40 years, and standing seventh in the all-time Churchill Downs win list, it looks as though Greg Foley might just be getting the hang of this training game. Heading into the fall, he has already won more prizemoney than in any campaign since starting out in 1981: $2,335,202 and counting, from 33 winners at 19%. And the bases are loaded, too.

For instance, the pair that condensed Foley's maturing momentum in finally becoming his first and then immediately his second Derby starters, Major Fed (Ghostzapper) and O Besos (Orb), have both been restored to training after summer lay-ups. And then there's Sconsin (Include), whose hometown stakes success last Saturday not only had the winner's circle overflowing with family and friends but arguably confirmed her the most feasible pursuer of champion Gamine (Into Mischief) in the GI Filly and Mare Sprint at the Breeders' Cup.

“We've had a good run the last couple of years, and this year's been especially good,” Foley acknowledges. “But you know, I've just been blessed with some nice horses. Like anybody else, the horses will take you there if you can get them–and we've got a pretty good bunch right now. We're just trying to get a little better horse now, and keep this thing rolling along.”

Sure enough, Foley has been prospecting the second week of the September Sale with a diligence, and an eye, not so common among trainers nowadays. For this is an all-round horseman raised in the old school by his late father Dravo, himself a familiar figure on the Kentucky circuit for five decades as trainer of 1,123 winners. Foley has long since surpassed that tally, closing on 1,500, while sister Vickie excels them both (for now, at any rate) in having trained a Grade I winner, Hog Creek Hustle (Overanalyze) in the Woody Stephens S. a couple of years ago. Now Foley is grateful that sons Travis and Alex have taken the racetrack dynasty into a third generation, despite having demonstrated an eligibility for a different walk of life with an MBA and law degree, respectively.

This, in fact, is a barn so steeped in horse lore that the man who sets the standards, and the tone, represents perhaps the most venerable culture–and perhaps the most vulnerable–in the training business today: the Kentucky “hardboot.” Vulnerable, of course, only for the very reason such horsemen are so venerable, namely an insistence on the kind of hands-on care that inevitably leaves them overshadowed by megabrand trainers with a cavalry of hundreds spread across time zones.

But nobody should misapprehend “hardboot” as implying anything stony or stubborn, when it more often yields the kind of classy demeanor, genial and modest, typified by Foley's refusal to disparage more industrial competition.

“I take my hat off to those guys,” he says courteously. “I don't know how they do it. They do a hell of a job. Of course, it's tough when you're running places like Churchill Downs, the best of the best are going to show up, and the big outfits all have young horses coming through all the time. So if you just got a handful, you've got to step up to run with them, that's for sure. But that's just the way it is. We're running with 40 to 45 head of horse right now. And I like that range: I'm all in one spot, taking care of them every day.

“And that can be kind our selling point, too. I pride myself on my care of the horses. They look as well as anybody's, I think, when you walk them over. And that came straight from my father. He was an excellent horseman, with an excellent eye. He raised some very good ones, too, he had a farm, and I was lucky enough at 18, 20 years old, that he trusted me enough to go off to the racetrack with them.”

So while racing is notoriously a quantity game, Foley is happy to concentrate on maximizing quality so far as possible; and more than happy that he has the right team to do so, with Travis as assistant trainer and the backing of longstanding patrons like Lloyd Madison Farms, the Wisconsin ownership group behind Sconsin.

Competition in the sales ring, mind you, is no less exacting than on the racetrack. But Foley, when talking to TDN, was cheered by having just landed a $100,000 brother (Hip 2034) to GIII Sunland Derby winner Cutting Humor (First Samurai) from the Claiborne consignment.

“Yeah, I finally got to buy a horse!” he says. “It's been brutal. I haven't seen that many people there in a lot of years. I guess people are just happy to be out again, and to have some kind of normalcy. But there's a lot of money out there, that's easy to see, and they're spending it, too. We're kind of middle-of-the-road buyers, we don't have the big money, and that was the first one I really had a chance to buy. Nice colt, the mare has already had some good ones, and I'm happy we got him.”

It was deep in the same sale back in 2008 that Foley found a Tiznow filly for $90,000. Named Sconnie, she broke her maiden second time out by seven lengths but disappeared after her next start.

“She was a beautiful filly, gorgeous,” Foley remembers. “And she could run, too. We had some bad luck with her. After her work one morning, in Churchill, she almost got to staggering walking off and scared me pretty good. We sent her off to the clinic and they found this heart defect, so we retired her right after that.”

Sconnie joined the small string of Lloyd Madison broodmares boarding on Alex Rankin's Upson Downs Farm, near the Foley family home in Oldham County. Her third foal is Sconsin, who really announced herself with an explosive allowance score at Churchill last summer, and won the GII Eight Belles S. before just missing the podium behind Gamine at the Breeders' Cup. She has since become plenty familiar with the rear end of the champion, but wins in the GIII Winning Colors S. and then in the Open Mind S. last weekend suggest that she might yet close the gap if ever granted an adequate pace.

“You'd be pretty hard pressed to find a prettier filly than Sconsin,” Foley remarks. “And I think she's in the top three fillies in the country, sprinting. I know we ran fourth at Saratoga [GI Ballerina H.], but that was in a paceless race against Gamine: they went :23, :45, and I'm eight lengths back off it. And on a speed-favoring track she was one of few horses that made up any ground that day. If you look at her races, it's when they go :21-and-change, that's when she wins. Maybe we're crazy, taking on Gamine in her hometown, she's an unbelievable filly, but let's hope somebody might go with her early. Like the other night, it was a short field but with two speed fillies. That made it good both for us and [runner-up] Bell's the One (Majesticperfection). We've had our little rivalry going on, but we got her this time.”

Bell's the One, of course, represents another small barn supervised by a veteran horseman bearing a surname greatly respected by the old school. Foley is full of praise for the way Neil Pessin has kept his star thriving, and enjoys their divisional rivalry behind Baffert's monster, who cost $1.8 million at auction.
It was a shame that Pessin was denied the usual carnival atmosphere when Bell's the One won a Grade I on the Derby undercard last September, and it was much the same for Foley–both in winning the Eight Belles the previous day, and then in finally realizing every Kentucky horseman's dream by making the walk over from the backside with a Derby runner.

The participation of Major Fed, another Lloyd Madison homebred, brought full circle a friendship with patrons (Fred Schwartz, Jim Bakke and Tim Sweeney) Foley had first encountered through their mutual friend Rob Lloyd, who would host his Wisconsin buddies at the Derby every year.

“They went from never having owned a horse to becoming my main clients,” says Foley. “First-class people. They've been a dream to train for. Obviously [the September Derby, behind closed doors] was much different from other years, but I was thrilled to be in the race and we had a good time. Major Fed got pinballed around early, and got very keen. He needed to sit and finish, but he was only a length or so off the lead coming to the first bend and I knew then we were in big trouble.”

Major Fed faded to tenth but a stylish allowance win on his return in June suggested that he will reward his team's patience after another absence since. Foley is aiming him at an allowance race on Oct. 1.
Having waited so long to renew the Foley clan's Derby history–Taylor's Special (Hawkin's Special), bred by his father, didn't get home in 1984 after winning the GI Blue Grass S.–the barn wasted no time in finding a colt to sample a proper Derby day in O Besos, who outran his odds for an outstanding fifth in May. And certainly his Fair Grounds form with Hot Rod Charlie (Oxbow), Midnight Bourbon (Tiznow) and Mandaloun (Into Mischief) looks none the worse for the rest he was given after finishing second in the GIII Matt Winn S. on his only subsequent start.

“O Besos actually just came back into the barn a couple of days ago,” Foley reports. “He looks great, and we're looking forward to later on this fall and early next year with him. He's run right up there with all those good horses that are still going now. In the Derby, when he came there saving ground on the inside, he made my hair stand up for a second, I thought we maybe had a good shot of winning. He was one of the few that made up any ground that day, and that was after being a little keen out of the gate which I think took away a little bit from his kick. He's filled out and grown up, from the little time off, and we're excited about having a big year with him [at four].”

So after all those years of incremental toil, it really does feel as though this admirable horseman is breaking into the next level. No doubt he has been helped by the next generation, with Travis excelling in client relations and recruitment. Foley admits that his son initially came aboard “just to give me a hand for a little while” while pondering career options, only to discover an inherited flair for the horse. Things played out similarly with Alex, who also helps out when his work for Steve Asmussen permits.

“I didn't keep them away but I did think they would wind up being lawyers or in business,” Foley says. “But anyway they found their way back over here and I'm happy they did. I grew up with it, and Vickie the same, as we were learning to walk. Years back, that's where trainers came from: it just ran in the family. So I guess it must be in the blood a little bit, they've taken to it so well.”

The boys' generation, of course, nowadays features among the opposition as well. But Foley, again, politely resists the invitation to agree that expensive horses, sent to younger trainers, will set them new puzzles that he has solved hundreds of times before.

“I would think experience would come in very handy,” Foley concedes with a chuckle. “But I can't knock anybody that comes up with good horses. You have to earn your way up. The horse is the whole thing. If you don't have a horse that can run, it doesn't matter who has them. It's just like if you're a football coach, basketball coach: you've got to have players to win ball games.”

Be that as it may, it's plainer than ever that Foley will reliably draw out the potential of whatever stock enters his seasoned hands.

“It took me a while to get to the Derby, but one thing about it, you want to do it again,” he says. “Sure enough, I was lucky enough to come back this year, and I hope it can become a habit.”

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Fulsome Headlines Indiana Derby As O Besos Connections Skip Race

Indiana's richest horse race will headline a day with purses in excess of $1 million Wednesday, July 7. The featured 27th running of the Grade 3 $300,000 Indiana Derby will be the final event on the 12-race program that begins at 2:25 p.m.

Heading the list of seven entrants for the Indiana Derby is Fulsome from the Brad Cox Stable. The three-year-old Into Mischief colt owned and bred by Juddmonte Farms of Kentucky comes into Indiana on a three-race win streak. He scored an allowance win at Keeneland in early April followed by a win in Arkansas in the $300,000 Oaklawn Stakes. His latest trip to the winner's circle was in the Grade 3 $150,000 Matt Winn at Churchill Downs in late May. Fulsome has drawn post one and will be guided by Florent Geroux, who won the 2020 Indiana Derby aboard Shared Sense for Trainer Cox.

Joining Fulsome as a likely favorite is Mr. Wireless from the Bret Calhoun Stable. The Dialed In gelding finished second in his last start, the $300,000 Texas Derby at Lone Star and is two for four this season. Mr. Wireless has drawn post seven and will be ridden by Ramon Vazquez. Trainer Calhoun was the winner of the 2019 Indiana Derby with Mr Money.

Missing from the entries is O Besos from the Greg Foley barn. O Besos had been pointing to the Indiana Derby at Churchill Downs, but a last-minute decision was made to skip the race.

“We're just passing the race,” Foley said through correspondence with Jennie Rees, Eclipse Award winning turf writer. “We checked him out, didn't really find anything. (But) I wasn't going to run him if he wasn't 100 percent. No sense entering him when I'm not going to run him. I don't think it's anything bad. Maybe the work the other day jammed something up a little. He wasn't lame or off or anything. The exercise rider didn't like the way he went, and I didn't either. You don't want to put him in a race like that when I didn't like the way he went a few days before it.”

The entire field for the Indiana Derby, in post position order with jockey, includes Fulsome (Florent Geroux), WW Crazy (Victor Santiago); Starrininmydreams (Luis Saez); Convention (Francisco Arrieta); Sermononthemount (James Graham); Full Charge (Adam Beschizza); and Mr. Wireless (Ramon Vazquez). Estimated post time for the Indiana Derby is 8:25 p.m.

Also featured on the 12-race card is the 26th running of the Grade 3 $200,000 Indiana Oaks, slated as the 11th race on the card. A total of 11 sophomore fillies have been entered into the race with the early nod going to the inside filly Will's Secret. Ridden by Jon Court, the Will Take Charge three-year-old finished third in her last start in the Grade 1 $1.25 million Kentucky Oaks at Churchill Downs. She is owned by breeder Willis Horton Racing and trained by Dallas Stewart and will start from post one.

Sitting directly to the right of her in the starting gate will be California invader Soothsay from the Richard Mandella barn. The Distorted Humor filly is two for three this year after going unraced at two. Her last start was a second-place finish in the Grade 2 $200,000 Sumer Oaks Stakes at Santa Anita. Flavien Prat guides Soothsay from post two.

The entire field for the Indiana Oaks, in post position order with jockey, includes Will's Secret (Jon Court); Soothsay (Flavien Pratt); Oliviaofthedesert (Brian Hernandez Jr.); Malloy (Adam Beschizza); Lovely Ride (Gabriel Saez); Sweet Pearl (Luis Saez); Li'l Tootsie (James Graham); Marion Francis (Florent Geroux); Lady Aces (Umberto Rispoli); Moon Swag (DeShawn Parker); and Forever Boss (Robby Albarado). Estimated post time for the Oaks is 7:43 p.m.

Indiana Derby Day will feature numerous activities to complement the racing program, including five $1,000 Megabet Win Wagers on the Indiana Derby, courtesy of the Indiana Thoroughbred Alliance. The twilight card will also feature a $500 Indiana Derby Hat Contest, Cigar Rolling Station, $1,000 Derby Warriors Handicapping Contest, Strolling Entertainment, and a community food booth featuring sno cones and cotton candy with all proceeds going to the Shelbyville High School Girls Basketball program. Free parking and free general admission will be offered for all racing fans with ample seating available on a first come, first serve basis.

The 19th season of Thoroughbred and Quarter Horse racing is currently in progress through Monday, November 8. Racing is conducted Monday through Thursday with a first post of 2:25 p.m. Monday through Wednesday. Thursday racing begins at 3:25 p.m. Six select Saturdays are offered for all-Quarter Horse racing beginning at 10 a.m. Indiana Champions Day, featuring the top Thoroughbred and Quarter Horses in the state, is set for Saturday, Oct. 30 with a start time of 12 p.m. For more information on events and racing, go to www.indianagrand.com.

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