Two trainers have two fillies each for the $100,000 Allen “Black Cat” LaCombe Memorial, the featured race Saturday at Fair Grounds, but a third trainer with one key entrant won’t be participating at all.
Cherie DeVaux said Alone Time, instead of racing in the LaCombe, a 1 1/16-mile grass race for 3-year-old fillies, will ship to Tampa Bay for the Florida Oaks. That not only removes a key contender from the LaCombe, but it also takes away the race’s only real speed.
Joe Sharp and Brendan Walsh are the double-handed trainers: Sharp entered Bohemian and Struck at Midnight, while Walsh has Indigo Woods and Ontology. Indigo Woods makes a journey opposite Alone Time’s, shipping from the Palm Meadows training center to New Orleans.
“Some of the owners are from [New Orleans], and they were keen to run,” Walsh said.
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Her morning-line odds of 8-1 will drop, but there’s good reason to be keen on Indigo Woods. She has raced once, coming from 10th to win a slow-paced Churchill Downs maiden turf route by 1 3/4 lengths, going away. She worked back once after that Oct. 26 race, breezing Nov. 12 at Turfway, before Walsh backed off and sent the filly to Florida.
She’s posted eight Palm Meadows breezes, all on turf, clearly progressing through the winter, judging from publicly available workout video.
“We gave her a few weeks after she ran,” Walsh said. “She’s been working well. She was obviously a nice enough filly last year, but she needed to advance, and she has.”
Ontology only cleared the maiden ranks Jan. 31 while making her sixth start. Walsh called her a “hard-knocking filly” and suggested earning any kind of black type Saturday would qualify as a success.
Bohemian figures to be favored, but with nine races already behind her, she clearly lacks the upside of a horse like Indigo Woods. Bohemian got an early start, debuting last April for a different trainer, but she didn’t win until her seventh outing, a November maiden turf route at Fair Grounds. Bohemian backed that up with a first-level allowance score Jan. 3, and three weeks later missed by a head facing males in the $100,000 Texas Turf Mile.
That race was run over a yielding course and, more importantly, went with just three other runners. And Bohemian, like Indigo Woods, could be hurt by a lack of LaCombe pace.
Who will lead? Who knows, but Aggressive Lime looks like a leading candidate. Another Florida shipper, this one trained by Brad Cox, Aggressive Lime races for the first time in blinkers and exits a lousy trip finishing fifth of 10 in the Sweetest Chant on Jan. 31 at Gulfstream.
She wired a one-mile Kentucky Downs maiden field in her career debut late last summer, disappointed with no apparent excuse in the Jessamine at Keeneland, and rebounded with a first-level, turf-route allowance win at Churchill to cap her 2-year-old season. If jockey Marcelino Pedroza rides aggressively, Aggressive Lime could make the lead and never look back in the LaCombe.
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