Trainer Barb Minshall will look to secure her second win at Saratoga Race Course when she sends out Emcee Racing, Jayson Werth, Berry Family Racing, Fortune Farm, and Robert Hahn’s TRIPLE TREA in Saturday’s Grade 3, $175,000 Sanford, a six-furlong main track test for juveniles.
The Woodbine-based trainer, who took down the 2017 Grade 3 Schuylerville with Dream It Is, saw Triple Trea close to win a five-furlong maiden special weight on June 4 over the Woodbine Tapeta by 1 1/2-lengths over next-out winner Bucyk in a solid race in which fifth-place Yacht Boy also returned to score.
“He’s really nice,” Minshall said. “He’s very rideable and it looks like there’s a lot of speed in the race. Hopefully, he makes his big run and can get the job done. There’s some really nice horses in there – the Asmussen horse [Gold Sweep] looks really tough – but he’s coming into it in good order.
“His debut effort was good,” Minshall added. “He just circled the field and ran them all down.”
The $75,000 Fasig-Tipton Kentucky Fall Yearling Sale purchase, by Bolt D’Oro, earned a 63 Beyer Speed Figure for his debut score and has breezed back three times, including a bullet five-eighths in 1:00 on July 8 over the dirt training track at Woodbine.
“It went real good,” Minshall said. “I train them a lot over the dirt. Last week the dirt was real good and he handled it well. He gets over the dirt well.”
Luis Saez will ride from post 7.
Minshall expects to send British Royalty back to New York on August 23 for the $135,000 John’s Call, a 1 5/8-mile turf test restricted to older horses non-winners of a Grade 1 or Grade 2 event this year.
Co-owned by Minshall with Bruce Lunsford, the 5-year-old English Channel gelding has hit the board in the last two runnings of the two-mile Grade 2 Belmont Gold Cup, finishing second to Loft in 2021 and third to Siskany last out while making his seasonal debut off a six-month layoff.
“I’m hoping to get him in an allowance race this weekend here – it’s only a mile and a quarter,” Minshall said. “It’s a race in-between, but we definitely plan to come back there with him. He was very sharp off that two-mile race and he wanted to go another two miles two or three days later. It’s so hard to find those long races.”
Minshall said the Ontario-bred will appreciate the marathon distance.
“He should probably be in Europe where they run those long, long races. He’s quite unusual that horse,” said Minshall, with a laugh.
Minshall has enjoyed past success at Saratoga with the aforementioned Dream It Is and also sent down Canada’s 1996 Horse of the Year Mr. Sassafras to run sixth in that year’s Grade 1 Whitney.
“We only ship if we think we can [win],” Minshall said. “We’ve brought some good horses over the years, but you can’t head down to those races and not feel like you have a good horse.”
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