Saturday Notes

Mystery solved regarding why Southwestern Heat has been working out at Philly Park—he’s no longer being trained by Tim Salzman. According to the nominations for tomorrow’s Karl Boyes Memorial Northwestern PA Stakes (damn, couldn’t they have come up with a shorter name?), Southwestern Heat is now trained by Tony Dutrow. Now, I happen to like this Dutrow brother, but I’m sad the Salzman connection has been broken, particularly as Tim’s father trained Southwestern Heat’s dam Xtra Heat. I look forward to seeing what Dutrow can pull out of this horse that owner Southcoast Stables felt Salzman couldn’t. By the way, Southwestern Heat is not entered at PID tomorrow, but he did work 5f on Saturday in 1.01:10 (4/12).

One of my Virtual Stable horses is G3 Florida Oaks winner Awesome Chic, and I noticed that her workouts have been occurring at Suffolk Downs. Curious, I poked around their website until I found this blog entry by Jessica Paquette who mentioned that the promising 3-year-old filly will be prepping there in anticipation of Saratoga’s big stakes races. She broke her maiden at Suffolk Downs last November at first asking—by 17-1/2 lengths.

Standout performances from Saturday: Smooth Air looked awesome winning the G2 Ohio Derby, as did Heatseeker blasting away from Tiago in the G2 Californian. And what more can one say about the spectacular Zenyatta? She got a horrible start in the G2 Milady, and then they crawled through the first half, but when she started moving from last to first around the final turn there wasn’t anyone to challenge her and she won going away. We’ll next see her in the G1 Vanity Handicap on July 5.

After the Ohio Derby, Graham Motion was quoted as saying about his runner-up Cherokee Artist, “We’ve know for a long time that he’s easily the best three-year-old in our barn, and he put in a great race today. We don’t know what’s next for him, but we’d like to think he’s a Saratoga-type of horse.” So where’s does that leave his G1 Preakness third-place finisher and G1 Belmont Stakes probable Icabad Crane in the stable hierarchy? Geez...