Foggy Night goes clear in Delaware Oaks win
Frank Vespe- July 1, 2023
If you were looking for a Delaware Park hunch play during a season that has seen four days of live racing canceled because of air quality issues, you might well have landed on Foggy Night in the Grade 3, $300,000 Delaware Oaks. And that would have made you very happy, indeed, as Foggy Night parlayed a perfect trip and a patient Paco Lopez ride into a 1 3/4-length score.
“I was waiting, waiting, and the favorite, she never showed up,” said winning rider Paco Lopez. “I was just patient.”
Lopez had Foggy Night positioned in third most of the way, and waited even longer as Miracle, with local product Trevor McCarthy up, tackled the longtime, longshot leader Opus Forty Two in rounding the far turn. When Lopez asked his filly in the lane, she came to the outside and gave her all, running somewhat erratically but prevailing, with Opus Forty Two fighting on for the place and Miracle finishing third.
Fireline, the 4-5 post time favorite for trainer Chad Brown, was an even and unthreatening fourth.
“She gave me everything she got, my filly,” Lopez added.
The win marked the second time in four runnings of the Oaks that Parx-based trainer Butch Reid had sent a longshot filly to Delaware to prevail in the Oaks. In 2020, it was 38-1 outsider Project Whiskey. Today, Foggy Night was 14-1 and returned $30.40 to win, while topping an exacta, with 16-1 Opus Forty Two in second, that returned $164.30 for a one-dollar wager.
“You know, I grew up a half-hour from here, so I’ve been coming here since I was a kid,” Reid said. “It’s great winning races here. It’s a great time; we love it here at Delaware Park.”
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Foggy Night, a three-year-old Khozan filly, cost owners Pine Brook Farm just $20,000 at auction at OBS last April. She now owns three wins, and $278,550 in earnings, from eight career starts.
Foggy Night broke her maiden last fall at third asking, cruising in a Parx Racing maiden special weight contest, which was also her first try around two turns. The Oaks marked her third start of the season and first time stretched back out to two turns as a sophomore.
“We gave her a nice freshening over the winter,” Reid explained afterwards. “She got a little stale towards the end of [last year]. We gave her a nice freshening, and we measured right up to this race.”
Foggy Night arrived off back-to-back seven-furlong starts, the second an easy allowance score over a somewhat nondescript field at Parx. Those two efforts primed her for today, and Reid said he believed his charge had demonstrated the quality to compete at this stepped-up level.
“She showed it as a two-year-old, and I think the key is, she could run a long ways, you know?” he explained.
Looking to the future, Reid and Foggy Night have options: stalls at Saratoga, races like the Monmouth Oaks. That latter is the route Project Whiskey took, finishing second.
“This is what we were looking for,” Reid said. “So we’ll go ahead and design the summer after this.”
Running time for the 1 1/16 miles on a fast main track was 1:45.07.
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