Trainer Dan Blacker admitted the reality of having won his first Breeders’ Cup race with Straight No Chaser in the Sprint on Saturday afternoon at Del Mar still hadn’t sunk in yet by the time he returned to the barn for training hours early Sunday.
“Everything had been pointing up to this race with him for the last six months, and just to get through all that and win, it’s really so unbelievable,” said Blacker, who trains Straight No Chaser for My Racehorse. “He’s such a really talented horse and I’m just so thrilled for him and the connections.”
Straight No Chaser, making just his third start of the season after returning from a year layoff during the spring, showed a new dimension in the Sprint, rallying from just off the pace under a perfectly orchestrated ride by his regular jockey John Velazquez to register a half-length victory over longshot Bentornato. Straight No Chaser earned a 103 Beyer Speed Figure, matching the figure he received for winning the Grade 2 Santa Anita Sprint Championship five weeks earlier.
Blacker had been on a bit of a roller coaster ride with Straight No Chaser prior to those two starts. Straight No Chaser, a son of Speightster, went to the sidelines for a full year following a resounding 7 1/2-length triumph in the Grade 3 Maryland Sprint at Pimlico in May 2023.
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“He was sound and training well after winning the race in Maryland,” Blacker recalled. “The ownership group did a deal to sell a piece of him shortly thereafter, but a pre-purchase exam revealed a spot on the PET scan that was concerning, so at that point, since he’d had a lot of racing and training, we felt that considering the issue it was in his best interests to have some time off. He still had some activity there when we took another scan three months later, so it wasn’t until around Christmastime that we were able to put him back in training again.”
Straight No Chaser finally got back to the races last spring, shipping cross country to Aqueduct for the Grade 3 Runhappy, only to stumble leaving the gate and finish fourth as the odds-on favorite.
“After the race at Aqueduct, our goal was the Bing Crosby this summer at Del Mar, but there was nothing in between on the calendar that made sense as a prep,” Blacker recalled. “Then a few days before the Bing Crosby my assistant, Juan Landeros, who has ridden him for years, came back from a gallop and said something didn’t feel right so it was a pretty straightforward decision to scratch from the race.”
Blacker said he eased Straight No Chaser back into training several weeks later, once ruling out any serious issues, after which everything went, as he called it, “straightforward.” Straight No Chaser won the Sprint Championship at Santa Anita and, on the biggest stage of all, the Breeders’ Cup here Saturday.
Blacker reported that Straight No Chaser came out of the Sprint “doing great,” but that nothing has been mapped out yet heading into the 2025 campaign.
“He’s definitely not going to be running back in two weeks or anything like that,” Blacker quipped. “We’ll sit down in a couple of weeks, look at all the options moving forward, and he’ll tell us when he’s ready to go again.”
Although he’s only started three times and has just one Grade 1 victory in 2024, defeating the best of the division in the Breeders' Cup certainly puts Straight No Chaser right in the middle of the conversation for Sprint champion when the Eclipse Award ballots go out in December.
“There are a lot of good sprinters around now, some very accomplished horses, so I’m just really proud that we were able to win that race yesterday. And to even be in contention for an Eclipse Award would be a great achievement,” Blacker said.
Straight No Chaser is one of two horses Blacker trains for My Racehorse, and his victory in the Sprint set off a raucous celebration in and around the winner’s circle from his legion of supporters.
So what is it like to train a horse for 800 owners?
“It’s really fun,” Blacker said. “One of the best things about this game is winning and sharing those wins with other people and their families, whether it’s one owner or 800 owners. It was just so rewarding to see all the emotion and all those happy faces out there yesterday after the race.”
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