Favorite things: Dance to Bristol

Over the next couple of weeks, The Racing Biz will celebrate the holiday season by sharing a few of our (and your) favorite pictures, articles, and videos from 2013.  Our folks have been on the spot for many of the most important racing days of the mid-Atlantic season and have come up with compelling words and images to tell the tales they’ve heard and seen.  We hope you’ll enjoy them…

DANCE TO BRISTOL

One of the region’s most compelling 2013 stories was that of Dance to Bristol.  The four year-old Speightstown filly rose from semi-obscurity — a nice local stakes filly — to the cusp of a divisional championship.  Trained by Ollie Figgins, III out of the Bowie Training Center and ridden this year by Xavier Perez, Dance to Bristol won seven consecutive races, among them three graded events in New York.  She stamped her ticket to the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint with a scintillating victory in the Grade 1 Ballerina at Saratoga.  In a wide open field in the Breeders’ Cup, she was sent off at 7.30-1, one of five fillies the bettors made between 3-1 and 8-1.  However, it was not to be her day; she bled through the Lasix that day, for the first time in her career, and though she ran gamely could manage just a sixth-place finish.  She ended her career with an emotional winner’s circle ceremony at Laurel Park.  The pictures here are from her win in the Skipat at Pimlico on Black Eyed Susan day; that victory, her fourth straight, immediately preceded her entrance into graded stakes company.

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