By T. D. Thornton
The surest sign that autumn is upon us is that we are already beginning to look ahead to next spring. In the racing world, that means the release of the 2025 Road to the GI Kentucky Derby qualifying schedule, and the list of points-awarding prep races that came out Friday contained a few tweaks. Two stood out–a schedule addition and a rule change.
Churchill Downs Inc., the gaming company that controls the Derby and the points system that determines which horses get into the race, locked up a prime piece of vacant real estate on the prep-race calendar by announcing several weeks ago that the GIII Virginia Derby would be run for the final time as a 1 1/8-miles grass stakes Sept. 7 at the CDI-owned Colonial Downs before being rebranded next Mar. 15 as a nine-furlong, points-awarding dirt race during a first-ever, four-day spring meet at Colonial.
This was a shrewd move by CDI considering the mid-March void that has existed on the Road to the Derby template since 2022, when Oaklawn Park moved back its own showcase race, the GI Arkansas Derby, to five weeks before the Kentucky Derby instead of three. In doing so, Oaklawn readjusted the timing of its preceding preps, most notably uprooting the GII Rebel S. from mid-March and transplanting it to late February.
Ever since, there's been a dead third Saturday in March on the national calendar, with no 3-year-old prep stakes (and no races of importance in any other division) seven weeks out from the Kentucky Derby.
Oaklawn enjoyed booming live and simulcast business when the Rebel had a hammerlock on that date slot, leveraging stakes-laden cards against soft national simulcast competition. Now Colonial is in a sweet spot to cultivate a similar “only game in town” niche.
A look at the charts from the corresponding third Saturday in March this past spring gives an idea of just how weak the national competition might be for Colonial six months from now: On Saturday, Mar. 16, 2024, the only two graded stakes in the country were a pair of Grade III sprints at Santa Anita and Oaklawn. Both Gulfstream and Fair Grounds relied on allowance races for their features and Aqueduct offered one ungraded stakes.
With the right mix of supporting stakes, Colonial figures to lure the country's top trainers and jockeys to Virginia for that otherwise slow Saturday, which will lend its new mini-meet substantial name-recognition credibility.
One unique wrinkle will be that Colonial's 10-furlong main track necessitates starting nine-furlong races from a backstretch chute, making it the lone one-turn, 1 1/8-miles Derby prep race in the nation. (Presumably, the GII Wood Memorial will join it in 2027 once Aqueduct closes and that stakes gets relocated to the new Belmont Park, where nine-furlong races on the 1 1/2-miles main track are also run out of a chute.)
Another interesting aspect is that CDI chose not to “bulk up” the Virginia Derby by granting it more qualifying points than the stakes at other tracks that immediately precede it.
Colonial's race will award 105 total points on a 50-25-15-10-5 basis to the top five finishers. That's the same as every other prep stakes from Feb. 22-Mar. 8 next season. But the very next race on the calendar, the Mar. 22 GII Louisiana Derby at 1 3/16 miles, starts the round of 100-points-to-the-winner stakes that goes up until the last of the nine-furlong preps Apr. 5.
Being right on the cusp of where the points scheme changes from 50 to 100 points to the winner, CDI could have lumped the Virginia Derby in with those other nine-furlongs-or-longer preps that start the next weekend. But it opted to keep the qualifying outlay realistic rather than dangle extra points as a sweetener to participate in a Grade III prep that has yet to establish itself.
CDI acted with restraint in that scenario. But the chase for Derby qualifying points has become so ingrained upon the sport's way of developing top 3-year-olds that you have to acknowledge the inherent power that the gaming corporation wields just by setting a schedule and points allotment that could, at any time, be changed to emphasize or de-emphasize any other track's signature sophomore stakes.
That might already be indirectly about to happen in California.
A rule change that CDI has instituted for 2025 will slice the number of points awarded in any Road to the Derby qualifier if the number of starters dips to five or fewer.
In five-horse fields, only 75% of the points will be proportionally awarded. In stakes with four or fewer starters, just 50% of the total points will get doled out.
That's a straightforward attempt to disincentivize short fields in consequential stakes. But the new rule might have an adverse, vicious-cycle effect on Road to the Derby races at Los Alamitos and Santa Anita, where juvenile and sophomore stakes already struggle to fill.
In 2023-24, there were five preps whose points outlays would have been altered had the new rule been in effect: One field of four, and four fields of five.
The GII San Felipe Stakes Mar. 3 at Santa Anita was the lone four-horse field. It drew five entries with one scratch.
The GII Fountain of Youth at Gulfstream, run the day before the San Felipe, started only five. It drew as a nine-horse race with four scratches.
The ungraded Jerome Stakes Jan. 6 at Aqueduct drew and started five.
The GII Los Alamitos Futurity Dec. 16 drew six and started five. They haven't had to use the No. 6 saddlecloth in that stakes since 2020.
The Oct. 29 GIII Street Sense Stakes at Churchill went with a field of five. A sloppy track contributed to three scratches from the original eight-horse lineup.
In California, will outfits be even more reluctant to enter sophomores in stakes there fearing that they'll be forced to run for diminished points? Will this cause them to lean toward other out-of-town qualifiers instead?
Or will the opposite occur, with trainers who are flush with stock running multiple horses just to ensure the race goes with six or more, even if those entrants don't truly belong in stakes company?
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