Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Excitations in La. Derby prep
Girvin won the Risen Star Stakes on Feb. 25 at Fair Grounds, and trainer Al Stall’s phone started ringing.
No, Stall doesn’t train Girvin; Joe Sharp does. But a colt whom Stall does train, Excitations, debuted in the same race as Girvin on Dec. 16. The pair dueled through the whole homestretch, with Girvin getting his head in front just before the finish. Girvin later won the Risen Star by two lengths.
“I kept telling people, ‘Sure, it might make him look good, but he still has to go out and do it,’ ” Stall said of Excitations.
Excitations will take another step toward showing what he can do in Sunday’s seventh race at Fair Grounds. Excitations is one of six 3-year-olds entered in a first-level allowance carded for one mile and 70 yards on dirt and also open to $50,000 claimers.
Stall has never been wild about winning sprint debuts with talented young horses, and Excitations’s narrow loss allowed him another start in the maiden ranks. Stall ran him back Feb. 2 in another sprint, and Excitations responded with a smooth 2 3/4-length maiden win.
Excitations will be an oddson favorite Sunday while trying winners and two turns for the first time, and if all goes according to plan, Excitations could have a very nice progression and foundation going into the $1 million Louisiana Derby on April 1 should he look like that sort of horse coming out of Sunday’s race.
Going into it, Excitations, who campaigns for the Fair Grounds Racing Club, looks a lot like that sort of horse. By Into Mischief and out of the Sunday Break mare Summer Song, Excitations is a good-feeling powerhouse of a colt who appears to have thrived over the winter.
Excitations can be a handful to handle around the barn, Stall said, but he is kind and responsive when put through his paces on the racetrack. At something like 2-5 odds, Excitations is not an appealing bet Sunday, but he is a very appealing prospect whose stock, thanks to Girvin, shot up last weekend while Excitations merely stood in his stall.
Welcomed win for Cohn
It was not a good year for trainer Alice Cohn in 2016, and it has not been a good winter at Fair Grounds.
Cohn, who has run a small string on the Kentucky and New Orleans circuits and steadily won her share of races during a long career, has seen her stable shrink in recent seasons. That number dwindled even further in December when one of Cohn’s horses was stricken with the neurologic strain of the equine herpesvirus and had to be euthanized.
As of last week, the Cohn barn consisted of two horses in active training, and Cohn, who still gets on her own stock, was riding one of them when the beast bolted coming off the half-mile gap following her training session. Cohn wound up on the ground and was lucky to have sustained nothing worse than a concussion.
Tuesday was Mardi Gras in New Orleans, with wild stuff happening all over the city. The fourth race at Fair Grounds consisted of just six runners, but the Cohn-trained Purgenality still was somehow 37-1. He went to the lead under Shaun Bridgmohan and was briefly headed but came again to win a $20,000 claimer by 1 1/2 lengths. Cohn owns the gelding herself. After an 0-for18 season in 2016, Cohn was 1 for 1 in 2017.
“No one was more shocked than we were that he won,” Cohn said. “You never know what that horse is going to do. I know his problems are between his ears. He’s got ability. He’s 9 years old now. I bought him as a 2-year-old at the Timonium sale for Jim and Susan Hill.”
Cohn, of course, showed up for work at the barn the morning after she hit her head.
“I’m pretty good,” she said Wednesday. “Feeling a lot better.”
And better still after Purgenality surprisingly led home a parade Tuesday.