By T. D. Thornton
A logical favorite and the longest shot on the board won Saturday's final pair of Grade I dirt stakes for 2-year-old males prior to the Breeders' Cup. With less than a month until the juvenile championship, those results represent a microcosm of the division itself–the obvious contenders are solid but not scare-away-the-competition kingpins, and there is no shortage of intriguing dark horses capable of punching through to assert themselves at the top of the crop.
'TDN Rising Star' Complexity (Maclean's Music) stepped up off a maiden win and stretched out to a one-turn mile while controlling a legit pace to wire the GI Champagne S. at Belmont Park. The Chad Brown trainee broke on cue, shot straight to the lead under jockey Jose Ortiz, and always looked comfortable edging away off the turn before getting a mild schooling through the stretch to make sure he knew to finish focused.
Complexity will now aim for the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile, but Brown has already acknowledged that two turns is a “question mark” for the frontrunning colt, and that 1 1/16 miles on the first Saturday in November might be the outer limits for how far the undefeated Complexity can carry his never-headed speed.
The Champagne itself is evolving into the type of race that is more suited to producing successful middle-distance specialists than Triple Crown threats. It was shortened back to a flat mile in 2005 after a decade-long run at 1 1/16 miles, and the two most recent winners–Practical Joke (Into Mischief) in 2016 and Firenze Fire (Poseidon's Warrior) in 2017–both went on to capture additional one-turn graded stakes at three after failing to win around two turns in their respective GI Kentucky Derby preps.
It's a good bet that Champagne runner-up Code of Honor (Noble Mission {GB}) will emerge as the “wiseguy” horse for the Juvenile. He lost his footing and pitched forward after a stutter-step break, was rated to last in an attempt to settle, then advanced methodically at the rail down the backstretch. He angled out on cue three-eights out, launching a five-wide bid at the head of the lane that he was able to sustain down the length of the stretch while whittling Complexity's winning margin to three lengths.
Bombs away in the Bluegrass…
About 20 minutes before they ran the Champagne in New York, officials at Keeneland Race Course were busy trying to figure out if the tote board still worked. That's because improbable 70-1 bomb Knicks Go (Paynter) blew it up after his jaw-dropping wire job in the GI Breeders' Futurity S.
Boasting only a maiden win at Ellis Park and a pair of so-so finishes in stakes sprints, few bettors heeded the whispers that the colt had been working even better than a pair of recent morning-training bullets indicated on paper.
Racing for the first time on Lasix, Knicks Go popped out of the gate on top, appeared to relish leading the 13-horse charge onto the back straightaway through sensible splits, then kept motoring all the way to the wire while widening his winning margin to 5 1/2 lengths. The $142 mutuel nearly doubled the previous high-price payout ($74.60) for the stakes established by Dawn of War (Catienus) in 2005.
The Breeders' Futurity is annually an intriguing, large-field betting affair, and this edition appeared to be a wide-open shootout on paper. Knicks Go no doubt benefited when the two projected favorites didn't show up–one literally, one figuratively. The morning line fave, GI Hopeful S. victor Mind Control (Stay Thirsty), spiked a fever and scratched. The 5-2 starting favorite, 'TDN Rising Star' Dream Maker (Tapit), got bumped and clipped heels shortly after the break and never was in it to win it. He finished twelfth with a cross-a-line-through-it horror trip.
Regardless of whether or not you think Knicks Go is capable of another coup in the Cup, it's refreshing to see the long list of “firsts” that accompanied his winning connections all down the line. The long-shot score represented the first Grade I wins for owner KRA Stud Farm, trainer Ben Colebrook, and jockey Albin Jimenez. It was also the first graded winner for young sire Paynter (Awesome Again).
Perhaps savoring the victory the most were the small-scale breeders of Knicks Go. Angie and Sabrina Moore are a mother/daughter bloodstock team whose GreenMount Farm in Maryland is relatively new to the business.
“When my family supported me 6 years ago to start breeding Thoroughbreds I would have never thought I'd breed [a] G1 winner,” Sabrina Moore posted on Twitter after the breakthrough win. “It's certainly a tough industry, but it's days like today that keep you going…. It's still hard letting them go, but you know that these horses end up with amazing connections and today was proof of that.”
So what does the future (wager) hold?
Now that we're nearly a half-year into the hastily arranged marriage between sports betting and pari-mutuels, surely there must be a creative bet-taker out there willing to offer some sort of novelty prop linking the Derby chances of Knicks Go with the namesake New York basketball team that hasn't made the NBA playoffs since 2013.
The New York Knicks are currently hovering around 200-1 odds to win the 2019 NBA championship. It's too early for Derby future book pricing on Knicks Go, but he too still rates as a triple-digit long shot. Even a wager that links Knicks Go starting in the Derby with the chances that the basketball Knicks will be in the playoffs on the first Saturday in May would be interesting.
And when the Derby future book odds lists do begin filtering out of Las Vegas (usually later this month), it's worth noting that Wynn Las Vegas–which for years has offered early odds on hundreds of Derby contenders–will no longer be in the business of operating a Derby futures book.
Horse Racing Nation first reported the news of the Derby book's demise, citing the recent departure of longtime Wynn Resorts sportsbook director John Avello, who has taken a new job as director of operations for daily fantasy sports company DraftKings.
On the more immediate wagering horizon though, your prospects in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Future Wager are looking good if you were able to resist playing the “headline horses” that dominated the racing news around the time when the pool closed on Sep. 2.
Shortly after the close of betting, both 'TDN Rising Star' Instagrand (Into Mischief) and Roadster (Quality Road), the top two favorites in the 24-entry Juvenile pool, were declared out of the race.
'TDN Rising Star' Game Winner (Candy Ride {Arg}), who now projects to be the pari-mutuel race-day favorite in the Juvenile, is a juicy 22-1 for that race in the futures pool. He was only a maiden winner at the time the odds were locked in, but has since won two Grade I stakes on the West Coast.
Other outsized individual Juvenile futures include 27-1 on Cairo Cat (Cairo Prince), who won the GIII Iroquois S. at Churchill Downs on Sep. 15, plus the two trip-troubled horses mentioned above: Code of Honor is 32-1 and Dream Maker is 17-1.
And the “all others” field bet at 8-1 now looks like an even stronger proposition considering the upward arcs of Complexity (unraced when the bet closed), Knicks Go, and the Hopeful winner Mind Control.
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