SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – There are a million ways to celebrate Memorial Day, but trainer Saffie Joseph Jr. may have found a new one. This past Monday, Joseph spent the afternoon sitting in his hotel room in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., rooting home three members of his potent stable in stakes races, with Be Your Best and Skippylongstocking making it a holiday to remember after capturing the Grade 1 Gamely and Grade 2 Hollywood Gold Cup at Santa Anita.
“I can’t move into the house we’ve rented for the summer up here until next week, so I’m still in a hotel for the time being,” Joseph explained. “And the day didn’t start out very well after Comedy Town, who we liked a lot, ran last in the [Speighstown] stakes at Lone Star. At that point, I remember thinking to myself, ‘Is this the kind of day it’s going to be?'”
Things got exponentially better for Joseph from that point on, starting with Mystic Lake’s two-length triumph as the prohibitive 3-5 favorite at Lone Star in the Memorial Day Sprint. A three-time graded stakes winner, Mystic Lake came into the race off a disappointing ninth-place finish in the Grade 1 Derby City Distaff Stakes on the Kentucky Derby undercard at Churchill Downs four weeks earlier.
“We put her in a tough race at Churchill. We wanted to regroup and she did just that over the wet track at Lone Star,” Joseph noted. “Now we’ll bring her back to Saratoga and maybe look at a race like the Honorable Miss for her next start.”
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As with Mystic Lake, Joseph was extremely disappointed by Be Your Best’s previous performance, an eighth-place finish over a “good” course in the Grade 1 Jenny Wiley at Keeneland on April 12. This snapped a three-race graded stakes winning streak for the vastly improved mare that featured a neck decision over Grade 1 winner Sacred Wish in the Grade 2 Pegasus Filly and Mare Turf earlier this winter at Gulfstream Park.
“The course had a lot of moisture in it at Keeneland, and the way she bounced back and won yesterday has me convinced she needs firm ground,” Joseph said Tuesday. “That’s the main reason we sent her out to California in the first place. Obviously, she ran huge and it was very satisfying to see her rebound like that.”
Joseph said Be Your Best will join his barn at Saratoga later this week, with the Grade 1 Diana likely next on her calendar, assuming the footing is firm and to her liking that day.
“One thing is for certain: We won’t run her over anything but firm footing moving forward,” Joseph added.
Skippylongstocking withstood a stretch-long duel with Midnight Mammoth to register a game three-quarter-length decision in the 1 1/4-mile Hollywood Gold Cup. Like Be Your Best, he was guided to victory by jockey Irad Ortiz Jr.
“If you watch a lot of his races, you’ll see that when he runs three or four wide he usually flattens out, so I was concerned about the trip he was getting,” Joseph recalled. “Fortunately, he was able to gut it out down the lane.”
Despite having won five graded stakes in his last nine starts, being Grade 1-placed in the Pegasus World Cup Invitational, and with career earnings in excess of $3.6 million, Joseph feels Skippylongstocking might not get the respect he deserves from the media or public.
“He’s probably a little underrated because he hasn’t won a Grade 1 yet, and I still feel he is capable of winning one,” said Joseph. “If he does, he should start getting a lot more credit. We had been planning on sending him back to the Stephen Foster, but when I saw the nominations for this race, it looked like he’d be three or four to five, so we decided on that path instead. He’ll fly back here Thursday with Be Your Best and I might still consider the Foster, although he had a pretty hard race yesterday, so we’ll see how he’s doing and take a couple of weeks before making that decision.”
Joseph will likely have moved out of his lucky hotel room and into more suitable accommodations by the time he goes for his next Grade 1 win a week from Saturday at Saratoga, where White Abarrio will run in the prestigious Met Mile. White Abarrio, who turned in an extremely impressive five-furlong drill over a sealed and muddy track here last Thursday, looked similarly sharp while open-galloping at close to a two-minute clip over the main track here Tuesday.
“We always let him pick it up in his gallop mid-week, and he really couldn’t be doing any better,” said Joseph. “He’ll have one more breeze before the race, maybe Thursday, weather permitting, although we are flexible and can move it back a day or two if need be. He had his last work over a wet track and I don’t want to do that again. We’ll wait until whenever we have a dry one this weekend.”
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