Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Travel Column could have Rachel Alexandra on itinerary
Travel Column will winter in New Orleans as her connections eye a possible start in the Rachel Alexandra Stakes on Feb. 13 at Fair Grounds.
Travel Column became trainer Brad Cox’s 30th gradedstakes winner of 2020 when she captured the Grade 2 Golden Rod on Saturday at Churchill Downs, beating Clairiere by one length in a race where oddson favorite Simply Ravishing finished fourth.
Cox and Chad Brown are tied for the lead in North American graded stakes wins this year. Cox’s 30 such victories have come with just 91 starters, a 33 percent strike.
Travel Column got an 84 Beyer Speed Figure while turning in easily the best performance of her three-start 2-yearold campaign. Pinched back at the start and last of nine early, Travel Column and Florent Geroux made a bold move off heels to go from two path to the four path at about the furlong grounds and ran down Clairiere, who appeared to be on the way to victory in midstretch.
Clairiere, making just her second start, is trained by Steve Asmussen and also could see Fair Grounds action this winter.
Travel Column, a Godolphin homebred by Frosted out of Swingit (making her a sister to $2.3 million earner Neolithic), won her Sept. 4 career debut at Churchill by more than four lengths before finishing a wellbeaten third in the Grade 1 Acibiades.
“The Alcibiades, first time running two turns and against horses with more experience, that was a pretty big ask,” Cox said. “She ran respectable. She needed some seasoning and she got that.”
Travel Column’s schedule isn’t etched in stone, but Cox said starting her 2021 campaign at Fair Grounds made sense.
“We’ll try to get her a couple starts and continue putting together a résumé worthy of a [Kentucky] Oaks start,” he said.
Cox also plans to winter Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner Essential Quality at Fair Grounds, but the colt has yet to ship south from Churchill and no plans have been set for his 3-year-old campaign.
Rough opening week
A horse named Wa cu d po sb ly g ow rngw on the seventh race Sunday at Fair Grounds, an appropriate coda to the fourday opening week of the 2020-21 season.
Opening day, Thursday, power issues took down track announcer John Dooley’s microphone as well as the regular Fair Grounds simulcast feed graphics package while rendering unusable some highdefinition cameras. The resulting product, a shaky shifting picture with no audio, felt like a relic from a different era.
Those issues were resolved by the end of the racing week while the weather only got worse. After fast tracks on Thursday and Friday, the main track was good and sealed throughout the Saturday card and sloppy and sealed during a rain-soaked Sunday card. A Wednesday deluge rendered the turf course unusable during the meet’s first two days and no grass races were run opening week, as 16 races carded for turf wound up being moved to dirt. Turf fields already were overflowing due in part to Churchill Downs’s abrupt cancellation of grass racing earlier this month, and in coming weeks it figures to be a struggle for horsemen to get horses into overfilled Fair Grounds grass races.
The good news is that the weather looks somewhat better this week; the bad news is another chance of showers Wednesday evening into Thursday afternoon. After so much rain last week it won’t take much to move Thursday’s scheduled turf races to dirt, including the featured sixth. This is a second-level allowance also open to $40,000 claimers restricted to fillies and mares and carded at about 1 1/16 miles.
Trainer Tom Amoss plays the main-track-only game as well as anyone in North America and has Figure It Out entered to run only if the race is moved to dirt. Figure It Out, claimed for $62,500 in June, finished second of four in an off-turf one-turn mile allowance race Nov. 18 at Churchill and will rate a solid win chance Thursday if she gets the chance to run.
On turf, In Good Spirits appears the most likely winner, though perhaps at underlaid odds since she’s a 3-year-old facing older rivals for the first time. Her most recent start, rained onto dirt, is a toss, and In Good Spirits ran competitively in three stakes races earlier in her 2020 campaign. She’s also the lone speed Thursday and can control the tempo under Miguel Mena.
Desert Oasis, whose most recent works have come at Belmont Park for trainer Neil Drysdale, has three California starts from earlier this year that fit the spot.
◗ The Steve Asmusen stable produced the Beyer Speed Figure stars of opening week as Nitrous got a meet-best 96 winning the Thanksgiving Classic on Thursday and firsttime starting 2-year-old Swiftsure, by Uncle Mo, got an 87 for a maiden sprint win Friday.