The last two prep races for the Run for the Roses – the Arkansas Derby and Lexington Stakes – will be run on Saturday, leaving handicappers a mere three weeks to make sense of what has been an exhilarating run up to the main event.
Mike Brunker
Mike Brunker is an assistant city editor at the Review-Journal and he writes a weekly horse racing column. The column is posted on Thursday's and appears in Friday's print edition. He previously covered horse racing for the San Francisco Examiner, the Thoroughbred Times and NBCSports.com. Follow @mike_brunker on Twitter
If we didn’t see the Kentucky Derby winner last week, then we almost certainly will on Saturday when the Wood Memorial, the Blue Grass Stakes and the Santa Anita Derby lure most of the top guns for the Run for the Roses.
The Group 2 UAE Derby — part of a stellar Dubai World Cup card — and the Grade 1 Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park make for a challenging handicapping challenge, part of which involves getting up early Saturday.
With just six weeks until the Kentucky Derby, give or take a day, most horses being aimed for the race are going to run just once more to try to secure a spot in the starting gates.
The Bob Baffert-trained colt has been spectacular in the first two races of his career, but his lack of seasoning raises questions about whether he’ll be ready for the moving mosh pit that is the Kentucky Derby.
Many bettors didn’t heed clear signals that Good Magic was not primed for a top effort in last weekend’s Fountain of Youth Stakes. They have an opportunity to rebound this weekend by applying the lesson from that defeat.
Just as playwrights use unseen characters to advance the plot, this year’s road to the Triple Crown has been overshadowed by two horses — Good Magic and Bolt d’Oro — whose absence has called into question everything we’ve been watching on stage.
When you use Twitter to filter for a specific niche like horse racing, you begin to receive valuable intelligence without lifting a finger. Best of all, it’s often information you wouldn’t necessarily think to search for.
More points used to determine the starters in the Run for the Roses are on the line starting with Saturday’s Risen Star Stakes (Grade 2) at the Fair Grounds. Horseplayers need to pay close attention to this second round of preps.
A record 570 horse racing handicappers are competing for $3 million in prize money, $800,000 of which will go to the winner of the three-day contest beginning Friday.
The Horse of the Year’s final race in the Pegasus World Cup was a wonder to behold and offers some important handicapping lessons as well.
Gun Runner, the 4-5 morning line favorite, drew post position 10, a major disadvantage in a 1 1/8-mile race where the horses enter the first turn almost as soon as they break from the gate.
We briefly detour off the road to the Kentucky Derby this week to consider the Pegasus World Cup, a little contest in Florida coming up next week that carries the distinction of being the richest horse race in the world.
We revisit last week’s Sham Stakes to highlight an angle that turned an unbettable race into an opportunity.
The Sham Stakes at Santa Anita and the Mucho Macho Man Stakes at Gulfstream Park on Saturday give newly turned 3-year-old thoroughbreds their first chance to show their stuff in 2018.