Sandman has had just one work leading up to the Rebel on Sunday at Oaklawn, and that’s by design, according to his Hall of Fame trainer, Mark Casse.
The horse, who finished a troubled second in the Southwest in his last start Jan. 25, worked back on Feb. 9, drilling five-eighths in 1:01.40.
“That was a significant work,” Casse said. “He breezed five-eighths of a mile and galloped out three-quarters. He’s ready.
“The older I’ve gotten, I believe that more horses are overtrained than undertrained. And I like them to be happy, where he’s in a happy place. We’ve already proven by his previous race, where he missed a lot of training because of weather, that it didn’t hurt his performance. So you’ll see I have that philosophy on a lot of my horses – whether they’re Derby horses or not Derby horses – that once they’re fit, we don’t do very much with our horses.”
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Sandman won an Oaklawn allowance in December ahead of the Southwest. He was a $1.2 million purchase at the Ocala Breeders’ Sales auction of 2-year-olds in training last March.
“I’ve always thought he was a good horse, but I hadn’t seen it. And I saw it in his victory in the allowance race, and then I saw it again in the Southwest,” Casse said. “He’s a horse that he kind of came to us in a little different format in that he was part of a dispersal, and he didn’t have the training that lot of these young horses have early on.
“He kind of was a fat kid when I got him, just galloping like a mile where so many of the horses were breezing three-eighths and halves already. But he went boom, boom, boom. Every time I threw something at him, he’d say, ‘I want more.’ So I’d say, ‘Okay, so I’ll give you more,’ and he’d say, ‘I want more.’ So for where he was when we got him to when he made his first start, it was amazing how quickly that worked out.”
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