Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Enterprising early favorite in $100K Soldier’s Dancer
Today at Gulfstream Park, horsemen seeking a big payday will eye one of two turf stakes on the 11-race card. For horseplayers, the task will be a bit more daunting as they will need to solve six races to earn their share of a lucrative payoff.
A mandatory payout of the 20-cent Rainbow 6 rolling jackpot will occur after the day’s final race, the $100,000 Soldier’s Dancer Stakes.
The pool accumulates if no unique ticket sold holds the winners of the final six races on any particular day’s card. Multiple winners then share a percentage of the pot with the remainder carrying forward.
Heading into today, the pool stood at $999,089 and is expected to at least double — reaching as high as $4.5 million — by the time the sequence begins with the sixth race. In handicapping a potential winning ticket, railbirds may be tempted to “single” the final race.
Enterprising has been installed as the overwhelming early favorite in the 12-horse Soldier’s Dancer field. Listed at 6-5, the Mike Maker-trained gelding is dropping down in class to compete in the 11⁄16 -mile race restricted to Florida breds.
In his last outing May 6 at Churchill Downs, the son of Elusive Quality finished sixth in the Woodford Reserve, one of the top turf races in the country.
Before that, Enterprising scored a pair of graded stakes wins at the Fair Grounds this winter. He was at Gulfstream in January, finishing second in the Sunshine Millions Turf.
Two other horses to watch in the Soldier’ s Dance rare Keep the dream alive and Two Step Time. Whereas Enterprising is dropping in class, Keep the dreamalive, at 5-1, will be making his first start in stakes company, having won his last three starts. His most recent win came May 4 at Gulfstream as he edged Two Step Time to take a turf allowance race by a neck. On the strength of that effort, Two Step Time is third choice at 6-1.
The mirror race for older fillies and mares, the $100,000 Ginger Punch Stakes, will go off just before the start of the Rainbow 6. The race has drawn a field of eight.
A win the race would hold special meaning for Leo Azpurua Jr., who will saddle second choice Something else. Azpurua is the nephew of longtime South Florida-based trainer Manny Azpurua, who died Tuesday. Somethingelse has finished in the money in each of her last six starts, but is looking for her first stakes win.
Slight favoritism has been assigned to Family Meeting. The 4-year-old filly has a graded stakes win on her resume, but that came in 2015 in the Jimmy Durante Stakes at Del Mar. She has two wins in her last four starts leading up to the Ginger Punch.