The 123rd live race meet at Hastings Racecourse in Vancouver has come together with Infinite Patience – just like last year and the year before. Which has BC race fans excited and proud.
Infinite Patience, of course, is the BC-bred mare (by Sungold out of Montero) who ended last year’s race season with a bang, winning five consecutive races including the $75K Northlands Distaff and the $50K R..K. Red Smith Handicap at Edmonton’s Century Mile, and now is working up a storm to try to extend that streak into her five-year-old season. Owned by Edmonton Oilers centre Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and her breeder, William Decoursey, she’s one of the best BC-breds of all time.
With seven regularly-spaced weekly workouts in a row (which race-players love to see), the most recent being Sunday, May 1 when she worked five furlongs handily in 1:01, the third-fastest of 48 horses that day, her trainer, Barbara Heads, would like to avoid what happened a year ago when the mare started the season with a startling seventh-place finish, her worst race at Hastings, before rebounding to win five of seven starts for the year. Her record now is 10 wins from 15 starts and she has earnings of $304,990 U.S.
Three of those losses came in Woodbine stakes races in 2020 – but should that be held against her?
“We went there because COVID meant no stakes races were being run at Hastings,” trainer Heads said in a telephone interview. “But she looked stressed before and after the race, probably because of the synthetic track.” Her mother, Montero, hated the stuff, Heads said. When she took her mother to Golden Gate Fields in 2008 after it installed a synthetic surface, she said “I couldn’t get her to race over it.” (Montero finished last in two races and second-last in the other.)
So Heads said she’ll continue racing Infinite Patience on Hastings dirt where all stakes races have been reinstituted. But “it isn’t out of the question” that she may go south at some point to test the mare’s talent in stakes races there. Named by the breeder, William Decoursey, for a trait of his wife of 43 years, Noi, Infinite Patience has anything but patience, Heads said. “She’s an over-achiever. Every time she’s on the track she wants to beat the other horses. There’s a fine line to keeping her happy. You can’t tire her out.”
The mare is pointed to the $50K Brighouse Belles Stakes for fillies and mares on Saturday, June 4, Heads said, but may race in an allowance race before that.
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The track is looking for a positive start, too, after suffering through two COVID-affected meets that saw a topsy-turvy schedule, small fields, a reduction in race days and cancelled stakes races. The track’s signature B.C. Derby hasn’t been run for two years.
“We’re at about 99 per cent of what we were before the pandemic,” said a very enthusiastic Dan Jukich, the track’s race-caller for 32 years and the simulcast race director. During the past two years the track with the most scenic backdrop in Canada (mountains, of course) experimented with a Monday/Tuesday schedule, then a Thursday/Sunday one and returned to Monday/Tuesday. Now it returns to its pre-pandemic roots: Saturdays and Sundays at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. There will be a slight variation in July when there will be racing on Canada Day Friday and, during the Pacific National Exhibition from Aug. 20 to 31, racing will be held Mondays and Tuesdays instead of Saturdays and Sundays.
The 45-day meet is scheduled to end on Sunday, Oct. 16. There will be 31 stakes races worth $1.85 million. The $125K B.C. Derby will be run on Saturday, Sept. 10 as will the $75K B.C. Oaks.
Last year, only “seven or eight” stakes races were run, Jukich said, and in 2020 just the four CTHS Sales Stakes were run. Fans weren’t allowed to return to watch the races until early July last year. “It was odd calling the races to an empty grandstand,” Jukich said. Fans had been banned in the early part of the meet and for all of 2020, of course, because of COVID-19 restrictions. The track’s 2020 meet began on July 6 and included just 35 race days; Last year there were 38 race days when two originally-scheduled days were cancelled because of excessive heat.
Primarily eight-horse fields – with average wagering of about $600K – were run in 2020, but that diminished to seven last year with about $500K average wagering. A few days had only five races. What swept everyone off their feet, Jukich said, was the $2.5 million handle on the second last day of racing last year when there was a mandatory payout of the Jackpot Pick-5. “We never thought we’d see anything like that,” Jukich said. That showed Hastings was still on many players’ radar – which augurs well for this season.
The track opened on Saturday with eight races, three with eight horses, four with six horses and one with seven horses.
While Infinite Patience will be a horse to watch, don’t be surprised if another highly-talented BC-bred filly or mare comes along. Jukich notes that “we’ve always had good fillies and mares around here” and he listed a litany of them, his all-time favourite being Delta Colleen “who came from nowhere” to mow down fields in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s with 23 wins from 73 starts, 20 of which were stakes races. Over the past decade there was Here’s Hannah who was a stakes machine, winning 15 races from 21 starts, 12 of which were stakes events including the Ballerina (Gr. 3). Then there was Touching Promise who won the Ballerina twice and Arabella’s Muse whose seven wins of 17 starts were stakes wins and Daz Lin Dawn whose eight wins from 23 starts were stakes.
Not to be totally outdone by the girls, however, Jukich notes that the BC-bred gelding Spaghetti Mouse was a star attraction in the first decade of the 2000’s, winning three Grade 3 stakes events: the B.C. Derby, the B.C. Premier’s Handicap and the Lieutenant Governor Handicap (three times).
Infinite Patience hasn’t just been the name of the best horse on the grounds, it also has applied to the steely resolve of everyone associated with Hastings to get through some of the most trying times the track has ever seen. How appropriate would it be for someone now to name a foal Finally Behind Us?
