FRASERVILLE, ON — Ontario’s exciting two-year-old pacing colts are back in action on Saturday night at Kawartha Downs, racing for a total of $135,000 in the third Grassroots event of their six-race season.
A total of 74 colts will line up behind the Kawartha Downs starting gate in nine divisions and four of them will hail from the Mark Steacy barn. The Lansdowne trainer expects all four youngsters to perform well over the five-eighths mile oval for his partners Peter Heffering of Port Perry and David Reid of Kingston.
The first colt the trio will have their eye on is Alberts Destiny in the fourth race. The Albert Albert colt will make his bid for a share of the $15,000 purse from Post 4 and Steacy hopes the fiery youngster is focused on racing.
“He’s a nice colt, but I probably should have castrated him earlier,” admits Steacy, who will also drive all four colts. “He doesn’t give as much as he should, his mind tends to wander. Hopefully he’ll mature and get better, but (castration) will probably be on the agenda before the end of the year.”
Alberts Destiny has two seconds and a third to his credit from six starts, but Saturday’s contest will be his first start in the Ontario Sires Stakes program.
Unlike his stablemate, Close The Bank is an OSS veteran having braved the Gold Series waters in his first provincial outing. The Run The Table colt, owned by Heffering, Reid, Stan Klemencic of Trenton and Arthur Slack of Cumbria, England, scored a fourth-place finish in the July 11 Gold Elimination at Woodbine Racetrack and captured the Gold Consolation July 18 with a 1:54 mile.
“Of the four colts, he should be the best,” says Steacy. “He tried the Gold earlier and he was competitive, but I raced him in the Battle of Waterloo and he made a break on the half-mile track. That’s why I skipped Flamboro (Gold event). I thought I’d try him at Kawartha on the bigger track instead. He should be very good.”
Close The Bank makes his Grassroots debut from Post 3 in the fifth race.
After missing a month of racing Dawnbrae Eclipse jumps into Sires Stakes action from Post 4 in the eighth race. The Chill Factor son was forced out of the Broussard Stake Final at Hippodrome de Montreal after injuring himself on the training track at Steacy’s Lansdowne farm the day before the July 20 race.
“The day before the Final he was out jogging and one of my other horses spooked at something and ran into him,” says Steacy. “He cut just the outside of his shin. It didn’t affect any tendons or anything but it was just bad enough that it got a little infection and he lost a month because of it.
“We qualified him last night (Aug. 12) and he qualified very nicely and came out of it good.”
Steacy’s final starter is Artistic Bunny, who has drawn Post 2 in the tenth race. The Precious Bunny son matched Close The Bank’s fourth-place finish in the July 11 Gold Eliminations, but ran into problems in the Consolation that the trainer has been trying to iron out ever since.
“He’s a very fast horse and he raced very good in the Elimination, but in the Consolation he tied up a little and we’ve been working the last month trying to get his blood back to normal,” says Steacy, who owns the colt in partnership with Heffering, Reid and Klemencic. “He’s not perfect yet, but his blood’s getting very close to normal now.”
Unlike Steacy, trainer Mike Wade will start just one colt at Kawartha Downs on Saturday night, but the Little Britain resident is just as optimistic about Winning Breed’s chances.
The Albert Albert son makes his Sires Stakes debut from Post 1 in the eleventh race, following a game plan that Wade and partners Betty Roberts of Little Britain and Bruce Woodrow of Woodville laid out before his July 20 racing debut.
“You’ve heard it before, you either get it early or you get it late; we’re trying to get some in the middle,” says Wade with a chuckle. “Our intention was to get six or eight starts into him and then quit. We’ll go along race by race and if there’s ever any concern regarding health or soundness I’ll pull the plug.”
Fraserville resident Doug Hie drives Winning Breed and Wade has nothing but praise for the job the veteran reinsman is doing with his novice pacer.
“Doug’s been doing a nice job bringing him along. He’s great with young horses, with any horse actually, but especially the young ones,” says Wade. “I drive in schoolers and early races, but I liked this guy well enough to leave him in Doug’s hands.”
Racing gets under way at 7:30 pm at Kawartha Downs on Saturday night and the two-year-old pacing colts will entertain fans in Races 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 and 11.