Lagynos will try and pull a Goliad in the Mint Millions on Saturday at Kentucky Downs.
Last season at Kentucky Downs, Goliad won a $500,000 handicap. Six days later, he landed the Mint Millions. On Aug. 28, Lagynos romped in the $500,000 Tapit Stakes. His turnaround is a few days longer than Goliad’s, still radically quick for this racing era.
Among the dozen entered to oppose him: Goliad himself.
Winless since the Mint Millions, though only thrice-started, Goliad has been aimed at this Grade 3 mile all season. And for good reason: Goliad earned about $1.2 million winning the $1.8 million Mint Millions in 2024, and this year’s renewal offers a $2.5 million purse.
The two horses bookend the field, Goliad and jockey Flavien Prat on the rail, Lagynos in post 13, a wide draw less fraught than at a typical two-turn mile on a standard American course. This mile begins on a straightway before a gentle right-handed bend leads into a long left-handed turn. Lagynos and jockey Jose Ortiz should be fine.
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A surprising number of horses start twice during this short meet. A surprising number of them race effectively. Lagynos’s trainer, Steve Asmussen, knows that. His record with horses returning for a second start stands at 5-3-0-1, and the horse who ran out of the money was utterly hapless.
Lagynos went through the three-race turf-route stakes series during Churchill Downs’s spring meet, performing well without winning. He skipped July, found himself in deep water finishing seventh in the Grade 1 Fourstardave, then captured the Tapit, restricted to horses without a 2025 stakes win, by 5 1/4 lengths. Lagynos traveled like a winner from the start. Ortiz cropped him a couple times and mainly hand-rode him to the wire.
“It wasn’t necessarily in the cards he’d run in both races, but if they like this course, they like it, and then they have a year to get over it,” Asmussen said. “He handled that group nicely and came out of it in good shape.”
Goliad, an 8-year-old based in California with trainer Richard Mandella, finished eighth and sixth in his two starts this season, but he’d been sixth and 11th before last year’s Kentucky Downs excursion. Mandella said he considered another Kentucky Downs double but didn’t feel he had Goliad quite ready.
“It took a while to get him back in good shape, but I think we got him fit enough. We thought it was better to take one good shot at it,” Mandella said.
Goliad, whom Mandella describes as a “big, heavy-headed horse,” knows only one way to race: Go to the front and see what happens. That leaves him with at least one, if not two, problems Saturday: Epic Ride and Point Lynas.
Epic Ride, a sprinter for most of his career, drew post 9 and in his last start, a two-turn Ellis Park mile, pressed a crazy-fast half-mile. Point Lynas, one of two England-based runners along with Cairo, makes his first start in North America, though he shipped to Qatar over the winter for a good second in a $500,000 race. Point Lynas runs like Goliad. If his rider takes too strong a hold, things do not end well. Giving Point Lynas his head and letting him roll has produced his best performances. The Mint Millions tempo should come up allegro.
Theoretically, that should suit the horse who’s had the best year, Spirit of St Louis, though his Grade 1 wins in the Pegasus World Cup Turf and the Old Forester Turf Classic feel distant. Sixth as the favorite in the June 8 Manhattan, Spirit of St Louis shows a trouble line from his eight-place Fourstardave finish, but when his rider steadied at the furlong grounds, Spirit of St Louis already had run up the white flag.
As with Goliad, the Mint Millions, owing to the astronomical purse and a Kentucky Downs win in the Gun Runner last year, stands at the center of Brilliant Berti’s campaign. Brilliant Berti finished ahead of Lagynos in all three Churchill stakes in May and June, winning two, most recently the June 28 Wise Dan, his last start.
“A good race over that track is important, and this has been the target since the Wise Dan,” trainer Cherie DeVaux said. “He’s been training really well.”
Brilliant Berti got in five Keeneland workouts during August, a busy pattern and a strong sign he’s in good form. Lagynos had no time to work between races. Last week’s Tapit might have served as his final drill.
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