Queen’s Plate hopeful Academic feisty filly
Aggressive personality will help her chances in Sunday’s 14-horse field at Woodbine
From the moment she was born at Spring Farm in Lucan, Ont., Academic has tried to boss around anyone — human or horse — who gets in her way.
The three-year-old filly is not a big and brawny thoroughbred; she’s more delicate and diminutive type, but don’t tell her that. It is this attitude that has made Academic a serious contender to beat the big boys in the Queen’s Plate at Woodbine racetrack on Sunday.
“She’s small but she’s very tough,” trainer Reade Baker said.
He’s seeking his first Plate win after 40 years in racing.
Academic comes off a 66-1 upset victory in the Woodbine Oaks on June 14 when her rider, Justin Stein, let her rush to a big early lead. Her time of 1:48.86 over the 1 1/8 mile distance of was a track record — and almost one second faster than Dan- ish Dynaformer’s time for the distance in the Plate Trial the same day.
Fillies do well in the Plate, as they usually come in off a sharp effort in the Oaks. Lexie Lou won last year, and was the fifth gal to do so in the last 30 years. It has been almost a century, however, since fillies won back-to-back editions of Canada’s most famous race: Troutlet in 1927 and Young Kitty in 1928.
Academic, purchased for $54,000 (U.S.) from a two-year-old sale in Florida last April by Danny Dion’s Bear Stables, has an aggressive side to her personality that makes her one of the best in the 14-horse Plate field. “She pushes me around when I am grooming her,” said Anthony Lewin, who took over as groom for the filly this year. “She doesn’t like to stand in one place, and wants to do things her own way.”
Dr. John Brown of Spring Farm is the breeder of Academic, and he remembers the filly’s early years vividly. “Oh, she was difficult,” Brown said. “When she was one-year-old and the girls on my staff were starting to brush and clean the feet of all the babies, she would have nothing of it. She would not stand still and she would bang her head around until she started bleeding.”
Brown tried to sell the filly as a yearling at the Woodbine sale but the market was collapsing around the announcement that the slots-a-tracetracks program was ending.
He bought her back for $20,000 and sent her to Florida with trainer Ricky Griffith.
“She was not a very co-operative filly to break (to the saddle),’ Griffith said. “But what I did notice is that for a smallish horse she had a very big way of moving.” Once Academic was bought by Dion and Baker, she was sent to Woodbine where she raced a few times last fall without winning. Then, she moved to Vera Simpson and Mike Dube’s Curraghmore Farm in Waterdown, Ont., for a winter vacation and some treatment on a vibrating machine called TheraPlate.
“It’s a wonderful machine,” Simpson said. “It promotes circulation, helps their feet and they relax and eat well when they stand on it.”
Academic returned to Baker this February in tip-top shape. But her antics got the best of her when she was scheduled to make her first start in a tune-up sprint in early May but acted up in the gate and was scratched.
Pressed for time to make the Oaks, Baker then ran the filly in a distance race, which she won by a neck, before encouraging Dion to pay $12,500 to supplement the filly to the Oaks field.
With the Oaks $300,000 winner’s share in her saddle bags, the $25,000 fee to supplement her to the Plate (she was not originally made eligible to the race) was a slam dunk.
Baker and Dion, who is known as the Bear, have enjoyed many years of top racehorses together but both would love to get their first Plate win.
“I wish there was a little more time between the races,” said Baker.
“But she’ll give her best.” Fillies who have won the Queen’s Plate since Woodbine opened in 1956: Flaming Page, 1962; Jammed Lovely, 1967; La Lorgnette, 1985; Dance Smartly, 1991; Dancethruthedawn, 2001; Inglorious, 2011; Lexie Lou, 2014.
(35 fillies have won in 155 previous runnings, seven have won since Woodbine opened in 1956) Record watch: Trainer Roger Attfield shares the most Plate victories, eight, with Harry Giddings Jr. who won his Plates from 1911 to 1942.
Attfield trains this year’s favourite Danish Dynaformer and long-shot Billy’s Star.