Tami Bobo's Simplification (Not This Time) returned to the Gulfstream Park worktab Saturday morning for the first time since scoring a dominant 3 1/2-length victory in the GII Fasig-Tipton Fountain of Youth S. Mar. 5 in Hallandale. The Antonio Sano trainee breezed five furlongs in 1:01.81 (15/28) under jockey Jose Ortiz before galloping out six furlongs in 1:14.85.
“It was a very good work. The horse worked in hand. He went very easy,” Sano said. “The gallop was good. The horse came back very good. That's what's important for me.”
Simplification rated well off the early pace before making a sweeping move to the lead and drawing away with authority to capture the Fountain of Youth. In the Feb. 5 GIII Holy Bull S., the Florida-bred colt, who had won the Jan. 1 Mucho Macho Man in frontrunning style, broke last from the starting gate and was caught wide throughout before rallying to finish second behind loose-on-the-lead White Abarrio (Race Day).
Trainer Kenny McPeek sent Lucky Seven Stable's Smile Happy (Runhappy) and Rattle N Roll (Connect) to the Gulfstream track to breeze in company following the break Saturday morning. Rattle N Roll on the inside and Smile Happy on the outside were credited with a joint bullet workout after breezing five furlongs in 58.81 (1/28).
“They worked super. They both needed a steady one and they both zipped along,” McPeek said. “I was really pleased with both of them.”
McPeek said he hadn't yet chosen between the GI Florida Derby and the Apr. 9 GI Toyota Blue Grass S. at Keeneland for Smile Happy's next start. Rattle N Roll, who finished fifth in the Fountain of Youth, is being pointed to next Saturday's GII Louisiana Derby at Fair Grounds.
Smile Happy closed to be second behind pacesetting Epicenter (Not This Time) in the Feb. 19 GII Risen Star S. in his 2022 debut after winning both of his races, including the GII Kentucky Jockey Club S. at Churchill Downs, in 2021.
OGMA Investments and Jack Hardin Towell Jr.'s O Captain (Carpe Diem), who closed from last to finish third in the Fountain of Youth at 87-1, breezed five furlongs at Gulfstream in 1:01.14 (11/28) Saturday morning. The Gustavo Delgado pupil, who broke his maiden at first asking and finished third in the Limehouse S. in his two prior starts, is being pointed to the Florida Derby.
Lucky Seven Stable's Smile Happy (Runhappy) is among possible candidates for Gulfstream's GI Curlin Florida Derby Apr. 2, according to trainer Ken McPeek. Lucky Seven Stable also owns McPeek-trained Rattle N Roll (Connect), who is scheduled to make his 2022 debut in the GII Fasig-Tipton Fountain of Youth S. Mar. 5 at Gulfstream. Smile Happy had been expected to make his second start of the year in either the GI Toyota Blue Grass S. at Keeneland Apr. 9 or the GII Louisiana Derby at Fair Grounds Mar. 26.
“You may see him in the Florida Derby,” said McPeek, who saddled Harlan's Holiday for a victory in the 2002 renewal. “I'm going to try and keep him and Rattle separated because they have the same owner. You'll see one in the Blue Grass and one in the Florida Derby following the Fountain of Youth.”
Smile Happy and Rattle N Roll are both stabled at Gulfstream. Smile Happy had a series of six workouts at Gulfstream prior to his second-place effort in the Feb. 19 GII Risen Star S. at Fair Grounds.
“This is a really good horse,” said McPeek. “He ran well in New Orleans. I think he could have been a tad closer, but the pace didn't set up well for him. He still showed real bravery to run late. This horse has a very bright future.”
Smile Happy won at first asking at Keeneland Oct. 29, closing from off the pace to win easily going 8 1/2 furlongs. He returned to capture the Nov. 27 GII Kentucky Jockey Club at Churchill Downs by 3 1/4 lengths, defeating Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway), who subsequently won the GIII Sam F. Davis S. at Tampa and third-place finisher White Abarrio (Race Day), winner of the GIII Holy Bull S. at Gulfstream in their respective 2022 debuts.
The chart of the GII Risen Star S. run Saturday at the Fair Grounds will show you that the race was won by Epicenter (Not This Time) and that runner-up Smile Happy (Runhappy) was never a serious threat to win. It's just that there is a lot more to this story.
Expectations were high for Smile Happy coming into the Risen Star. He was 2-for-2 last year and his win in the GII Kentucky Jockey Club S. came at the expense of Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway) and White Abarrio (Race Day). Classic Causeway won the GIII Sam F. Davis S. in his next start and White Abarrio captured the GIII Holy Bull S. in his 3-year-old debut. Colleague T.D. Thornton had Smile Happy on top in his TDN Derby Top 12 and Mattress Mack was out there doing his thing, helping to promote the horse who may be Runhappy's best offspring.
Smile Happy was made the 2-1 favorite, but with the way the race unfolded, he never had a serious chance.
Epicenter, a quality horse, was sent to the front by Joel Rosario and, going into the first turn, it looked like he might face some pressure. But Pioneer of Medina (Pioneerof the Nile) and Boddock (Street Boss) backed off. That left Epicenter alone on the lead. When he got through an opening half-mile in :47.94, it was clear that he was going to be hard to beat.
Meanwhile, Smile Happy was eighth in the 10-horse field down the backstretch. He probably could have won from there if the rest of his trip broke his way, but that didn't happen. Entering the far turn, jockey Corey Lanerie found himself bottled up between horses. Throughout the turn, he couldn't find a running lane and once he did he was still eighth. It looked the best he could do was fourth or fifth. But Smile Happy managed to close a good amount of ground inside the final 100 yards or so and was beaten just 2 3/4 lengths.
Finishing third, Zandon (Upstart) also put in a strong effort. He hopped at the start and was last early behind the slow pace. Despite all that, he lost by just 3 1/4 lengths.
After the race, trainer Ken McPeek said he had yet to decide what would be next for Smile Happy. The GII Louisiana Derby on Mar. 26 would be the logical spot. He'll surely get one more race before the Kentucky Derby to show why so many people were so high on him. Next time, he won't get beat.
Smile Happy, Runhappy's best colt, may have been beaten in the Risen Star, but it was far from a lost day Saturday for Jim McIngvale's favorite sire. At Oaklawn, the 3-year-old filly Happy Soul (Runhappy) came off a layoff of more than eight months to beat a good field in the Dixie Belle S. A decisive winner, she turned in an impressive effort.
When last seen, Happy Soul scored an 11 1/2-length win in the Astoria S. at Belmont. Considering that Happy Soul has never gone beyond six furlongs, a start in the GI Kentucky Oaks might be a stretch, but trainer Wesley Ward said the race is under consideration. Ward said she will make her next start in either the GI Ashland S. at 1 1/16 miles or the Apr. 10 GIII Beaumont S. at seven furlongs. Both races are at Keeneland. A start in the Ashland would mean that Ward is serious about the Oaks.
Breeders' Cup Juvenile Starters Continue to Come Up Short
When Pappcap (Gun Runner) finished eighth in the Risen Star, it marked the latest loss by a horse who had run in the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile. Pappacap was second in last year's Juvenile.
There were 11 starters in the Juvenile and not one has won since that race. They are a combined 0-for-9. Five Juvenile starters have not run since the Breeders' Cup, a list that includes winner Corniche (Quality Road). He has not had a workout this year and there have been no updates on his schedule. It is unlikely that trainer Bob Baffert will have him ready for the Derby.
He may not be a superstar, but there are few horse in the sport that are more admirable than the 7-year-old Cordmaker (Curlin).
He was bought for $150,000 at the 2016 Fasig-Tipton Midatlantic Fall yearling sale by owner Ellen Charles and sent to trainer Rodney Jenkins. It was apparent early on what they had. Cordmaker, who was gelded before his career debut, was one of those tough old pros who just went out there and tried every single time.
He came into Saturday's GIII General George S. at Laurel with 13 career wins overall and nine stakes victories. But he had never won a graded stakes.
As last, he got it done, winning the General George by three-quarters of a length. It was his fourth straight win, all of them coming in stakes. At seven, he's never been better and with $989,640 in career earnings he could go over the $1-million mark in earnings in his next start.
The Marcus Vitali Meth Case
Marcus Vitali should have been thrown out of this sport a long time ago. His record is as bad as it gets. And shame on tracks like Turf Paradise and Presque Isle Downs that have opened their doors to him.
But that doesn't mean Vitali is guilty of the latest charge, a one-year suspension and a $10,000 fine handed down by the Pennsylvania Racing Commission after a horse he ran last summer at Presque Isle Downs tested positive for methamphetamine. Going to bat for Vitali, Todd Mostoller, the executive director of the Pennsylvania Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association, which represents horsemen at Penn National and Presque Isle Downs, said that the methamphetamine positive was a result of environmental contamination and that Vital should not have been suspended
He very well could have a point. Common sense says that giving a horse meth would not result in an improved performance and use of the drug by humans is rampant.
But the bigger issue is whether or not Vitali is being treated differently because he is, well, Marcus Vitali. Mostoller said there have been “three or four” other methamphetamine positives in recent months at Penn National and in all those cases it was ruled that the positive test was the result of environmental contamination and the trainers were not suspended.
In 2017, a Peter Miller-trained horse tested positive for methamphetamine after running in the Pennsylvania Governor's Cup at Penn National. The Pennsylvania Racing Commission ruled that there were “mitigating circumstances” and fined Miller $1,500 but did not suspend him.
Vitali does have rights and should be treated like any other trainer. He's going to fight this and he may just win.
As somebody remarked at the time, on seeing B. Wayne Hughes and M.V. Magnier deep in conversation one morning before the 2019 Breeders' Cup: “I'll give you 140 guesses what they're talking about.”
Both men were at Santa Anita representing farms that have had a transformative influence on the commercial breeding landscape, developing a similar system for launching stallions on an industrial scale. We have, of course, since grieved the loss of Hughes–but among his many legacies can now be counted a supporting role in the defeat of The Jockey Club's contentious proposal to cap books at 140 mares.
True, the litigating farms had not yet managed to net that particular whale when a harpoon from the Kentucky state legislature got the job done virtually overnight. That initiative will maintain the 72nd district representative in the esteem of many in his community, as one of their own; and wherever you stand on this divisive issue, you know that Matt Koch, for one, will absolutely buy into the decorous talk of unity with which The Jockey Club sugared the pill they've had to swallow.
And it really does feel incumbent on all who have prevailed here not just to be magnanimous in victory, but also to take that step back and ask whether at least some of the concerns The Jockey Club had sought to address might merit collective attention.
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All parties profess to have the interests of the breed at heart, albeit sometimes perceiving these in a fashion that blatantly coincides with their own. And certainly it can be argued that The Jockey Club's approach was too arbitrary–in both senses of the word–to deal effectively with a challenge as complex as maintaining genetic diversity. To me, however, we only ended up in this pickle because the real need for correction fell beyond the reach of any enforcement: at ringside, that is, and in the behavior of buyers.
As it was, we ended up with a stand-off that could be conveniently conflated with wider polemics. The conservative establishment, for instance, resisting brash, self-made success; or paternalism versus the free market. Following the intervention in Frankfort, it can even be depicted as a test of the kind of state autonomy we are seeing harnessed, as sacrosanct, against federal menaces to the constitutional right to dope your racehorse.
The trouble with all this emotive symbolism is that if you're not careful you end up taking a train that terminates in no regulation at all. And then how would you preserve the integrity of the breed? If there's enough money in it, for enough people, you'll end up with a cookie-cutter racehorse, between artificial insemination and eventually cloning, the only remaining differentiation being what you inject with your needle.
For now, it's well-worth remarking that actually nobody would be better suited by a more even spread of mares than the stallion farms themselves.
Trying to get your money back on a stallion in barely 18 months is a horrible business model for their accountants. But that is pretty much what the market is often asking them to do, in flitting from one rookie to the next like a honeybee in a hothouse. While operations as skillfully adapted as Spendthrift and Ashford still seem able to keep a stallion in the game at least through years two and three, many young sires are being abandoned overnight by breeders terrified of getting stuck with the second or third crop of a sire cooling off in the ring–albeit even then he still won't have had a chance to demonstrate whether he can actually breed runners. Nothing, in the end, should be more commercial for a mare than a bunch of stakes horses under her name. But, if you're breeding to sell, then you'll probably start off by mating to sell, too.
And really, as I've often acknowledged, you can no more blame commercial breeders for the overall situation than you can the farms. Both are trying to put bread on the table through the notoriously precarious agency of an animal prone to countless game-ending mishaps. So, the only reason hundreds of mares are sent to unproven new stallions, many of whose credentials are decidedly marginal anyway, is because of anticipated market demand.
Now, I've been rebuked in the past that proven stallions are so expensive that you have no choice but to roll the dice on a new one. But I won't buy that while some new sire who will probably end up with one stakes winner in Panama, and standing in Oklahoma, continues to draw three times the mares than, for instance, one who produced winners of the two most prestigious dirt races in America, in Lookin At Lucky.
I do willingly concede two things. One is that the situation is infinitely worse in my homeland Britain, and Ireland. At least commercial breeding in Kentucky remains properly focused on a horse that can run two turns on the first Saturday in May. The other is that there is a self-fulfilling logic to investing in a first crop, in that most stallions will never get a better book than their debut one.
That said, I do think we all need to take our share of responsibility–above all, those who direct investment at ringside. They need to be held account both by their affluent patrons, who want nothing better than a runner; and by the breed itself, which would be far better served by the seeding of commercially unglamorous but demonstrably effective sires. If The Jockey Club's attempt to stem the tide simply wasn't viable, then it's up to all of us to make such contribution to the betterment of the breed that falls within our reach.
So note that while the two big Derby hopes resuming in the GII Risen Star S., Zandon and Smile Happy, each happen to be from only the second crops of their sires, both Upstart and Runhappy stand at farms that keep a voluntary lid on book sizes. This, of course, is partly because they believe they actually look after their clients better that way, by preventing inundation at the sales. And the whole reason I'll be rooting for Zandon is that he was brought into the world by such exemplary people, who scrupulously dovetail their commercial mission with the long-term prosperity of the Thoroughbred itself.
Certainly this, at last, looks like the race to put horses back at the center of the Derby conversation, rather than one particular trainer. True, Smile Happy happens to represent a barn that finds itself with Baffert-like depth, this time round; and his win over the Derby track last fall has now been advertised further still by Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway). Just like Zandon, however, he comes into a tough field pretty raw. You feel that both horses only need to run well enough to set up a grab for the necessary gate points next time.
If they do make the Derby, mind, they plainly won't have many miles on the clock. Whether such delicate handling, increasingly common among modern trainers, might reflect some perceived or actual dilution in the breed is hard to say. Perhaps a horse like Zandon would have been perfectly equal to an old-school grounding: his sire, after all, was placed at the elite level at two, three and four. But there are plenty of old sages around who will tell you that horses today simply don't have the timber of generations past.
And that's the kind of trend we must keep in mind if tempted to predicate our breeding strategies only on short-term gain. If you didn't like being told what to do by The Jockey Club, that's fair enough. But if, as everyone invariably claims to be the case, your choices are governed primarily by the welfare of the horse, then you shouldn't need telling in the first place.
If there's one thing more sacred than your right to take your own decisions, it's the wellbeing of these noble animals as they pass through our brief stewardship. Rights, remember, are the other side of the exact same coin as duty. If we want to take our own decisions, then we must also accept the accompanying responsibilities.
