HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – After giving Rohan Crichton the first graded stakes victory of his training career with his convincing tally over Madaket Road in the Grade 3 Pat Day Mile on the Kentucky Derby undercard, it will be on to Saratoga and the Grade 1 Woody Stephens for the 3-year-old Florida-bred Macho Music.
Crichton, who is based primarily at Gulfstream Park with a small satellite string that currently includes Macho Music at Churchill Downs’s Trackside training center, said turning the speedster back to seven furlongs is the next logical step. The Breeders’ Cup, either the Sprint or Dirt Mile, is the ultimate goal at the present time.
“The long-term plan is the Woody Stephens, and if that proves successful, the Allen Jerkens so we can keep him at seven furlongs and against 3-year-olds for the summer,” Crichton advised. “That way we can wait before running him against older horses until the Breeders’ Cup.”
Crichton, who is part-owner of Macho Music along with his partners Mark Taylor and Daniel Walters, said the group has fielded several offers to sell their rising star since his breakthrough performance in the Pat Day Mile.
“Right now, the owners want to stay in,” Crichton said. “They enjoy the action, the horse continues to get better, and at the moment he is 100 percent sound, although we all know how this business goes, so we’re trying to manage the risk the best we can.”
Although Macho Music’s blazing speed has been his biggest asset, especially over the sealed and sloppy track at Churchill Downs on Derby Day, Crichton trained him to sit back and relax in the morning in his works leading up to the race.
“As a 2-year-old, he just wanted to flat fly in the morning. He was working too fast,” Crichton recalled. “But he’s really started to mature now. His last two works before the Pat Day Mile, he went five furlongs in like 1:03 and 1:04. The tempo of those works were much more to my liking, although breezing him like that still doesn’t take his speed away. We saw that in this last race, although if Madaket Road had gone all out for the lead, I think Javier [Castellano] could have taken him back and he’d have been just fine.”
Crichton, who won 13 races during the 2024-25 Gulfstream Park Championship meet, said he plans to keep Macho Music in maintenance mode at the training center in Louisville until shipping him to Saratoga for one final breeze just prior to the Woody Stephens on the Belmont Stakes undercard on June 7.
Full field in feature
There was no shortage of interest in Thursday’s $43,000 allowance headliner for Florida-bred fillies and mares, 3 years old and up. The main event lured a full field of eight plus three also-eligibles to go five furlongs on the grass. Heavy rain earlier in the week could ultimately necessitate moving the race to the Tapeta track.
A switch in surface might not alter the final starting lineup all that much, with the majority of the eight runners drawn into the body of the field all proven commodities on the synthetic strip. The group includes the veteran mare Happy Ride, a versatile sort who was a game entry-level allowance winner over the Tapeta on April 5. She returned to finish second following another race-long pace duel against statebred allowance foes less than two weeks later.
Turf or Tapeta, Happy Ride figures to vie for favoritism with Shelovestotravel, who launched her career in stellar fashion, with a well-graded, wire-to-wire, 1 1/4-length maiden win against statebreds over the synthetic surface here April 4. The 3-year-old daughter of St Patrick’s Day showed blazing speed in her debut, remaining clear to the wire while earning an 80 Beyer Speed Figure for the performance.
Handicappers will have to decide the significance of jockey Miguel Vasqeuz’s choice to keep his regular seat aboard the red-hot Travel Happy despite having ridden Shelovestotravael to her impressive debut win. Travel Happy, another who figures to be an early pace presence, brings a three-race win streak into the race, each of those victories having also come over the synthetic course.
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