INNISFIL, ON — Nine precocious two-year-old trotting fillies will return to Georgian Downs on Tuesday, July 24 for their first $130,000 Gold Final, and trainer Scott McEneny expects the young trotters will deliver an impressive show.
“There are a lot of nice fillies in there, five or six of them actually,” says McEneny. “It will be an interesting race on Tuesday.”
In the elimination round last Tuesday, seven of the nine fillies hit the wire in under two minutes and laid down last quarters faster than 30 seconds. All four winners trotted around the five-eighths mile oval faster than the previous track record, and Torch wrote her name into the Georgian Downs history books with her 1:59 triumph. None of the nine fillies who earned a return trip to the Innisfil oval made breaks in the elimination, and only one made any mistakes during the pre-season qualifiers and races.
McEneny’s protege Beyond Limits was a 1:59.2 winner in her elimination, floating off the starting gate from Post 1 into a mid-pack position, and then powering up the outside with a :29.2 last quarter to claim a four and one-quarter length win over B Cor Reba. Veteran reinsman Steve Condren piloted Beyond Limits last week, and in a pair of qualifiers at Mohawk Racetrack earlier in the month, and McEneny says the Milton resident has done a flawless job educating the daughter of Angus Hall and No Boundaries.
“We haven’t been aggressive with her. It’s the first part of the year and she’s still learning,” says the Waterdown resident. “We don’t want her to be a hot Angus (Hall), and Steve’s the right guy for that.”
Rather than concentrate on teaching the filly to hustle off the gate, the pair have focused on teaching her to sprint home, and McEneny hopes that will continue to be her strength through Tuesday’s Gold Final.
“Any time she’s ever trained, or even raced, the last piece she’s always trotting on in,” says the horseman, who trains the filly for the Beyond Limits Stable of Toronto, Stephen Moza of Kelowna, BC and Joe Tinelli of Edmonton, AB. “She’s pretty manageable right now in a race, so hopefully she stays like that.”
When she arrived at his barn after last fall’s Forest City Yearling Sale, where she was a $42,000 purchase, manageable was not a word McEneny would have used to describe Beyond Limits. Fortunately, after a few difficult weeks the filly relaxed into her new role and soon started to look like she would be one of the better two-year-olds among the 10 McEneny and his staff were training.
“She had a little temperament, it took a little while, but once we got through that she’s been fine,” recalls McEneny. “She’s a pretty sensible filly for an Angus Hall, and she always trained down like a good filly.”
Condren and Beyond Limits will start from Post 7 in the ninth race on Tuesday, with the other elimination winners, Dornello, Somebody To Love and Torch, lining up at Posts 3, 8 and 9. Georgian Downs’s first race gets under way at 7:35 pm.
For complete entries please go to:
http://www.standardbredcanada.ca/entries/data/egeodftu.html#N9