Yesterday and today: April 12 racing highlights
Monster Sleeping won an allowance at Laurel Park on April 3. Photo by The Racing Biz.
From Staff Reports
YESTERDAY’S NEWS: OUT WITH A BANG?
Trainer Ramon Preciado is looking at a lengthy vacation after incurring a half-dozen clenbuterol positives, and he apparently figures he’d better win while he can.
The trainer sent out four winners yesterday, giving him seven in the last two days at Parx. All told, his four winners — from five starters — on Monday earned $139,440 from the purse account.
Preciado took the day’s two biggest purses, both in allowance company. In the seventh, a one mile test for three-year-olds and up with with a purse that, after bonuses, hit $74,900, his Roxbury N Overton posted a front-running score when he just managed to hold off Adirondack King to win by a nose. It was Roxbury N Overton’s third straight win and pushed his career earnings to $289,234.
Two races prior, the Preciado-trained Broad Lover won a first-level allowance, also in front-running fashion. In between those two races, Preciado sent out Trouble Kid, who won last year’s Grade 3 Gallant Bob and won but was disqualified for bumping in the Frank J. De Francis Dash, against starter allowance foes; Trouble Kid scored easily in a sharp 1:15.77 for 6 1/2 furlongs, snapping a five-race losing streak.
Hector Caballero and Joshua Navarro each rode two of Preciado’s winners.
ALSO…
- Six of the eight races on the Parx card were won by the favorite. Four of those favorites were odds-on, including Trouble Kid (1-5), Broad Lover (2-5), and Extrasexxyeurodude, who took a claiming race for Marcos Zulueta at odds of 1-5.
LOOKING AHEAD: TODAY’S RACING
- Private Terms Stakes winner Abiding Star (2-1) headlines a three-other-than allowance going one mile 70 yards that’s the top race at Parx Racing today (race seven). The three-year-old, trained by Ned Allard, was supplemented to the Triple Crown for $6,000 following his front-running score in the Private Terms; among his connections’ options was returning to Laurel for the Preakness “win and you’re in” Federico Tesio Stakes, but the outbreak of equine herpesvirus which has placed Parx under a quarantine foiled that plan. J.D. Acosta will ride the Uncle Mo colt. Here, in a compact field, he’ll have to tangle with 2014 Pennsylvania Nursery winner Nasa (9-5), who scratched out of a tougher spot yesterday to race here, and six-year-old He’s So Fine (3-1), who’s earned nearly $300,000.
- In the fifth at Parx — the only regional track in action today — we’ll see a rare sight in Bensalem these days: a full field. Ten horses are slated to face the starter, and lukewarm favoritism falls to Whogoosedthemoose (5-2), a Howard Brown trainee who’s been facing starter allowance foes of late. The Spring at Last filly has won four of 14 starts, and Frankie Pennington will ride. Her top rival looks to be Folly Fashion (7-2), a Miguel Vera trainee who most recently beat lifetime claiming company.
