HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – A couple of Grade 2 stakes winners who between them have earned well more than $1 million racing exclusively on dirt, Steal Sunshine and Maryquitecontrary, may be looking for another outlet to showcase their talents after working over the Tapeta surface at Gulfstream Park within minutes of one another Friday.
Steal Sunshine, idle since finishing fifth, beaten 6 1/4 lengths by Kingsbarns, in the Grade 1 Stephen Foster on June 29 at Churchill Downs, breezed four furlongs in 48.28 seconds before galloping out five-eighths in 1:01.01 for trainer Bobby Dibona with jockey Paco Lopez aboard.
Steal Sunshine has captured 1 of 5 starts in 2024, his lone victory coming in the Grade 2 Gulfstream Park Mile after outgaming Tumbarumba by a nose following a stirring stretch duel. The 5-year-old son of Constitution also finished third in the Fred Hooper and Ghostzapper stakes here during the Championship meeting, beaten three-quarters of a length and a length, respectively, in the two Grade 3 events.
“He’s got a sister [Lute Warm] who has won three in a row on the turf, so the owners would like me to try him on grass again. He ran once on the turf way back, but that was very early in his career and he was just okay,” Dibona said. “Paco said he definitely doesn’t think he’s the same horse on synthetic as the dirt. Right now, I’m looking at the same stakes we ran him in here last winter and ideally would like to get a race into him, hopefully a conditioned allowance if it will fill, on the main track prior to that.”
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Maryquitecontrary is coming off a non-threatening fifth-place finish behind Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Sprint-bound Soul of an Angel in the Grade 3 Princess Rooney on Sept. 21. She is now winless in six tries dating back to her victory in the Rampart Stakes in her 2023 finale in late December.
Maryquitecontrary, whose most important victory came in the Grade 2 Inside Information in January 2023, seemed to handle the synthetic surface quite nicely on Friday, zipping a half in 46.93 without being asked for her best. She galloped out five panels into the clubhouse turn in 1:00.09 while working with a light rain shower falling at the time.
Tampa Bay Downs drying out
Officials at Tampa Bay Downs said despite extensive flooding to the parking lot and barn area from Hurricane Milton, they see no issue with the track opening it’s 2024-25 meet as scheduled on Nov. 20.
The opening of the barn area was postponed from Oct. 23 to Oct. 28 due to the effects of Hurricane Helene, which devastated the area a couple of weeks earlier. A decision on whether there will be any further delays as a result of Milton will be forthcoming.
“We had some flooding in the barn area and a little other minor damage to the grandstand from Helene,” said Margo Flynn, vice president of marketing and publicity at Tampa Bay Downs. “The second storm left a lot of flooding in the parking lot and has cut off access to the barn area, which is also under water. Just how much so is a bit hard to tell at this point.
“The ground is so saturated from all the rain we’ve had in this area that the water is not moving out as quickly as we’d have hoped. And we still do not have power here, front side or back, since the storm.”
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Tampa Bay Downs is located approximately 1 1/2 miles from Tampa Bay, and Flynn said the damage would likely have been far more extensive had the eye of Milton made landfall a little further north on Wednesday.
“Luckily, we did not get the storm surge we likely could have had the storm came directly over Tampa Bay, although according to reports the rainfall here was coming down at a rate of a foot an hour for a while,” Flynn said. “The good news from all of this is that luckily there were no horses on the grounds at the time of either storm.
“At the moment, it’s just too early to tell if we’ll have to push back the opening of the barn area once again.”
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