OZONE PARK, N.Y. – If Thursday’s Aqueduct card looks familiar to handicappers, well, it should. Five of the nine races on the program are ones brought back from the Jan. 9 card that was canceled due to high winds.
The fields for each of the five races have gone under slight renovations since they were originally drawn, including the featured multi-conditioned allowance race for sprinters which this Thursday is carded as race 2. Initially drawn with five, this six-furlong heat now has six, including three horses who were not originally entered.
Clear the Air is one of the three original entrants that are back and the re-draw of the race may have benefited him. Initially drawn in post 2, Clear the Air now breaks from the outside post. He could play out as the primary speed or sit just off Surveillance, who is drawn right inside of him.
“Ideally his best trip was the race at Saratoga, where he’s able to keep his face clean, be clear of traffic, sit and stalk and pounce at the quarter pole,” trainer Will Walden said. “He’s got a quick turn of foot.”
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Walden was referring to a second-level allowance race that Clear the Air won by 1 1/2 lengths on Aug. 4 at Saratoga. That was his first win on a dirt surface, his previous three wins coming on turf or synthetic.
Walden said Clear the Air came out of that allowance win sore, and combined with having run 11 times in nine months, was in need of a break. Clear the Air worked six times at Turfway Park. including a pair going five furlongs, and got in a work at Belmont last Friday that Walden feels should have him fit enough for his return.
Ramon Vazquez comes in from Oaklawn to ride Clear the Air.
Of the seven horses Clear the Air beat in Saratoga, four of them won their next starts, including Top Gunner, who captured the Parx Dirt Sprint. Not among the horses entered when this race was scheduled Jan. 9, Top Gunner is in Thursday for Brad Cox, replacing He’smyhoneybadger, who popped an abscess on a foot and was not entered back.
Since the Parx victory, Top Gunner has run in three Aqueduct sprint stakes – a fifth in the Bold Ruler, third in the Fall Highweight, and fourth in the Gravesend.
“He seems like a horse who runs [well] in every other race,” said Dustin Dugas, Cox’s New York-based assistant. “He improved in the Fall Highweight and he ran just an okay race in the Gravesend; it wasn’t a horrible race but it wasn’t anything to get excited about either.”
Dugas said this race looked more appealing than going back into a stakes like the Toboggan on Feb. 1.
Surveillance, who won the off-the-turf Troy Stakes last summer at Saratoga, is making his first start off the claim for Linda Rice, who took him for $62,500 out of a narrow defeat on Nov. 24.
Scoot Daddy returns to dirt after a third-place finish over Woodbine’s synthetic surface.
Five Dreams and More Vino are new faces in this group, both looking a bit overmatched on paper.
With nine races scheduled, first post Thursday is 12:10 p.m.
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