Hofburg bred for distance
NEW YORK — There are horses for courses, and Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott thinks he has one ready to upset Justify’s bid for a Triple Crown in the Belmont Stakes.
The colt is Hofburg, the 9-2 second choice in the $1.5 million race Saturday. Justify will look to become thoroughbred racing’s 13th Triple Crown winner and second in four years. American Pharoah ended a 37-year drought in 2015.
Mott is the first to acknowledge that beating the undefeated and heavily favored Justify won’t be easy. Trainer Bob Baffert’s colt was impressive in winning the muddy Kentucky Derby more than a month ago, and the son of Scat Daddy showed a lot of heart in fending off Bravazo and Tenfold in the foggy Preakness almost three weeks ago.
“Our horse has been getting some attention. They made him second Belmont Stakes hopeful Hofburg gallops around the track during a workout Wednesday at Belmont Park. choice in the morning line,” Mott said of Hofburg. “From the rumblings I have been hearing, it seems there are a few people talking about him, and handicappers seem to like him.”
Hofburg finished seventh in the Derby after encountering traffic problems, and he skipped the Preakness. The lightly raced 3-year-old colt, ridden by Irad Ortiz, has one win in four career starts; his best performance was not that win but his second-place finish in the Florida Derby. So why the hoopla? Hofburg has the genes for the 1 -mile race. He is the son of Tapit, who has sired three of the past four Belmont winners: Tonalist (2014), Creator (2016) and Tapwrit last year. When American Pharoah won in 2015, the second-place finisher was Frosted, another son of Tapit.
“You have to have a horse that really wants to When: 6:37 p.m. Saturday TV: NBC (Ch. 4)
do that, and is capable of doing that,” Mott said of the distance, the longest of the Triple Crown races. “That’s one of the main ingredients right there. Some of those horses are just made a little different. They move a little different and have the lung capacity, and they have the whole package to do it.”
Mott said horses can be trained to run longer distances, but it’s better to have one bred to do it rather than transforming a miler into a distance runner.
There’s more to Hofburg’s hereditary than Tapit. The colt’s dam was Soothing Touch, a daughter of Touch Gold, who won the Belmont in 1997 by three-quarters of a length, denying Silver Charm a Triple Crown. Baffert also trained Silver Charm.