Cox to skip Preakness after 2-4 Derby finish
After saddling two of the top four Kentucky Derby finishers, trainer Brad Cox intends to skip the 146th Preakness.
Neither Derby runner-up Mandaloun nor beaten favorite Essential Quality will run May 15 at Pimlico, Cox said Thursday. Also missing the race, Cox said, will be Caddo River, whose Arkansas owner has won the Preakness twice.
Mandaloun finished a half-length behind winner Medina Spirit with champion Essential Quality fourth, beaten one length, in Saturday’s 19-horse field at Churchill Downs. Caddo River, a homebred colt owned by John Ed Anthony of Hot Springs, missed the Derby after running a fever.
Mandaloun, a stakes-winner
who prepped in Louisiana, will “point to Grade 1 races for the rest of the year,” Cox said on a National Thoroughbred Racing Association teleconference. “He ran extremely well and hard, and we just feel we would like to give him some time and not run him back in two weeks.”
As he said earlier about Essential Quality, Cox mentioned the Grade 1 Aug. 28 Travers at Saratoga as a long-range goal for Mandaloun. “The goal is to get him to the Travers in the best shape we can,” the trainer said. (Essential Quality opened his
3-year-old season winning Oaklawn’s Grade 3 $750,000 Southwest Feb. 27, then shipped to Keeneland, where he won two Grade 1 wins last year, and took the Grade 2 Blue Grass April 3.)
Caddo River, Oaklawn’s Smarty Jones mile winner Jan.
22 and second in the Grade 1 $1 million Arkansas Derby April 10, may return in the Grade 3 Matt Winn May 29 at Churchill Downs, Cox said. The Hard Spun colt broke his maiden over the Louisville track last fall. In his first two starts, Caddo River finished second ahead of Greatest Honour, a future multiple stakes winner for Hall of Famer Shug McGaughey.
With Caddo River out of the race and Grade 1 Santa Anita Derby winner Rock Your World breaking poorly, Medina Spirit led from gate to wire in Kentucky Derby 147. With John Velazquez riding his fourth Derby winner and second straight, fellow Hall of Famer Bob Baffert saddled his record seventh winner in the race and 17th in the Triple Crown.
Medina Spirit and Baffert-trained Concert Tour are the likely Preakness favorites in a potential field of nine 3-yearolds. Concert Tour did not run in Louisville after a disappointing third-place finish in the Arkansas Derby, that after winning Oaklawn’s Grade 2 Rebel March 13.
Midnight Bourbon and Oaklawn-raced Keepmein-mind, sixth and seventh in the Kentucky Derby, are probable Preakness starters. So is Oaklawn maiden winner Ram, a Wayne Lukas-trained American Pharoah colt who won an allowance race on the Churchill Downs undercard Saturday.
A bit shorter than the Derby, the mile-and-three-sixteenth Preakness was restored to its traditional third-Saturday-in-May date after switched to October last year because of the coronavirus pandemic. Oaklawn stakes winner Shedaresthedevil upset Derby winner Authentic at Pimlico, joining Rachel Alexandra (2009) as the only Preakness-winning fillies since 1924.