Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Free Like a Girl ships, faces open company
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – The millionaire Free Like a Girl will be one of the highest-profile shippers from Delta Downs to ever run at Oaklawn Park when she goes in the ninth race Friday.
The two-other-than allowance for fillies and mares will be run at a mile. The 10-horse field includes Backyard Money, who is stretching out to two turns off a runner-up finish in the Carousel; Jubella, who owns the field’s best last-race Beyer Speed Figure; and Stellar Lily, who has won her last two races by a combined margin of 12 lengths.
Horses shipping to Arkansas from Delta’s six-furlong oval in Louisiana often fare quite well. It’s something Free Like a Girl’s trainer, Chasey Deville-Pomier, has seen first hand through the years as she’s sent horses from Delta up to the Oaklawn division of her father, trainer Carl Deville.
“They run off the screen a lot of times,” she said. “I think it’s the surface, going from a deep, sandy beach to run over it. They get a little bit fitter on that track [at Delta] and then they just kind of keep themselves together when they get to Oaklawn.”
Free Like a Girl is a 14-time stakes winner, with most of those victories coming against Louisiana-breds. She is the state’s reigning horse of the year and is traveling to Arkansas at a time when Delta’s meet has just wrapped and the season has not yet started at her summer base of Evangeline Downs.
“We’re trying to time it out to give her a little prep for the Shantel Lanerie in New Orleans,” said Deville-Pomier.
The $100,000 Lanerie is for Louisiana-breds on March 24 at Fair Grounds.
Free Like a Girl last raced Feb. 3, finishing second by three-quarters of a length in the $125,000 Premier Night Distaff at Delta. The effort came following a runner-up finish in the Grade 3 Houston Ladies Classic at Sam Houston on Jan. 27. In the Distaff, Free Like a Girl was prominent on a muddy track under jockey Vicente DelCid, and gave nine pounds to winner Wholelottamo.
“I was proud of her effort,” Deville-Pomier said. “She really tried. You know, coming off that big race in Houston, I think Vicente kind of threw the reins his normal place at her and she pricked up her ears and he said, ‘Okay, we’re going to go on,’ and she just came up a little short being she’d run the week before. And Wholelottamo was just on fire that day. She came rolling, loved the track. I kind of figured Wholelottamo would like that track and when I saw her kick in, I knew we were in a bind.”
Deville-Pomier made the decision to run back in a week after careful consideration, going day by day with the notoriously good-feeling Free Like a Girl.
“If she would have left any feed the night before, I would have said, ‘Nope, we’re not running,’ ” said Deville-Pomier.
She subsequently debated awaiting the Lanerie, but Free Like a Girl has been hard to keep on the ground and as such, she gets a bridge race rather than waiting seven weeks to Fair Grounds.
Jubella enters off a first-level allowance win for which she earned a Beyer of 88. She is a half-sister to multiple stakes winner D R C’s Pretty Sky, whose foal Usually Wrong debuts in race 10.