Trainer hopes breaks finally go Maxfield’s way
Trainer Brendan Walsh, a 47-year-old native of Ireland, chuckled when asked if he’d brought his unbeaten colt Maxfield to run in Saturday’s $400,000 Grade I Santa Anita Handicap for a shot at the “Wild West Bonus.”
“I didn’t even know it existed,” Walsh said during a telephone interview this week.
Instituted this year, the connections of any horse that sweeps the Big ‘Cap, the Hollywood Gold Cup (May 31) and Del Mar’s Pacific Classic (Aug. 21) will earn a $1 million bonus on top of the purse
money for winning those Grade I stakes races.
Anybody can use a cool $1.875 million, right?
“It didn’t even enter my head,” Walsh said. “But it’s a nice thing to be there for whoever wins on Saturday. It will be an added incentive to try to win the other two races as well.”
It could be described as poetic justice if Maxfield were to sweep the three races and collect the bonus because his career to this point has been filled with nothing but road blocks. Maxfield, a 4-year-old son of 2007 Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense, was considered one of the favorites for the 2019 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Santa Anita when he had to be scratched just days before the race because of a bone chip in his right front ankle.
Last year, after winning the Grade III Matt Winn Stakes at Churchill Downs on May 23, it was discovered that Maxfield had a condylar fracture of his right front and he had to be taken off the Triple Crown trail.
The silver lining was that the fracture was not a career-ending injury.
Maxfield returned Dec. 19 at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, posting a 2 ½-length victory in the ungraded Tenacious Stakes before making his first start of 2021 a winning one with a 3 ¼-length victory in the Grade III Mineshaft Stakes at the Fair Grounds on Feb. 13 to run his record to 5-0.
“You get over (the disappointment) in a few days and then you just gotta focus on when they do come back,” Walsh said of missing last year’s Triple Crown series. “We knew he was going to come back at some point, so that kind of kept us going. But yeah, it was disappointing because it was an important year and everybody wants to try and win the (Kentucky) Derby or the Triple Crown races.
“We missed our turn, but hopefully there’s other big races for him as an older horse and hopefully he can make amends.”
Maxfield gave Walsh, who has worked for the colt’s owner, Godolphin, for a number of years during a career that also saw him serve as an assistant to Eoin Harty in the early 2000’s, his first Grade I victory when he romped home by 5 ½ lengths in the Breeders’ Futurity at Keeneland in October 2019.
Walsh has been out on his own since 2012 and enjoyed a productive 2020 campaign despite Maxfield’s woes. He won with 15 percent of his 375 starts while campaigning mostly in Kentucky, Louisiana and Florida.
So why the Big ‘Cap?
Why didn’t Walsh stay home and run Maxfield in the $400,000 Grade II New Orleans Classic at the Fair Grounds on March 20?
“It’s (Big ‘Cap) been in my mind from the start of the year,” he said. “We felt this would be a good next step for the horse, a good opportunity to win a Grade I, go a mile and a quarter, have to travel out here. It’s all going to be beneficial to him in the long run win, lose or draw.”
As for the 1 ¼-mile distance?
Maxfield has never run farther than 1 1/16 miles, but seeing as though his papa won the mile-and-aquarter Derby, it doesn’t figure to be a problem.
“I don’t think the mile and a quarter is going to be a problem for him,” Walsh said. “I think he’s adaptable. I think his best distance is anything between a mile and a sixteenth and a mile and a quarter.”
Considering he once called Santa Anita home while working for Harty, winning the Big ‘Cap with the best horse he’s ever trained would be a thrill.
“Any Grade I win would be special, but Santa Anita is so surrounded and steep in history that it would always be very nice to win a big race at Santa Anita,” Walsh said.
Not to mention the fact it would help make up for a lot of disappointing days.
Approximate post time for the race is 4:30 p.m.