WINDSOR, ON — For Ontario’s top three-year-old Grassroots competitors the focus of their season has narrowed to one race, their $100,000 division Championship at Windsor Raceway on Sunday evening.
Eight contestants, the top four finishers from each Semifinal held at Windsor Raceway last weekend, will vie for the Grassroots title in their division and the first crown awarded will be to a three-year-old trotting filly. The trotting distaffers kick off Championship Night in Race 6 and, much to the delight of her rivals, division leader and Semifinal winner Our Pleasure has drawn the outside Post 8.
“She’s fortunate that she can leave, but the eight-hole is not the best for any horse,” says the filly’s owner and trainer John Bosworth of Newmarket. “It’s a tough position, but we’ll do our best. With any luck at all she’ll leave out of there and get a hole or go to the front.”
Our Pleasure and driver Ron Waples posted the fastest victory in the Semifinal round, stopping the clock at 2:00.1 off a front end effort. The duo face an impressive line up on Sunday evening, including the other Semifinal winner Aspasia, who clocked in at 2:01.4 last weekend and will start from Post 2 in the Final.
“I don’t know how fast she is, but in the class that she’s in she seems to be holding her own,” says Bosworth of the Super Pleasure daughter’s Semifinal effort. “She’s turned out to be a pretty honest racehorse really.”
After Our Pleasure and her peers light up the Windsor skies the pacing fillies will kick thing up another notch in the eighth race and trainer Bob McIntosh is hoping Its A Cam Lie can pick up a share of the $100,000 pie from Post 3. The Windsor resident shares ownership on the Camluck lass with CSX Stables of Liberty Center, OH and was impressed with her second-place showing in the Semifinal round.
“I was very happy with the way she raced last week,” says the reigning Johnston Cup winner as the top trainer in the Ontario Sires Stakes. “Maddy Girl kind of stands above the rest, she looks like she could be a Gold filly, but Its A Cam Lie left hard and still hung in there at the end.”
Division leader and Semifinal victor Maddy Girl drew Post 6 in Sunday’s Championship and, although he might have liked a spot closer the rail, trainer Jim Ainsworth of Sarnia is not losing any sleep over it.
“She hasn’t got real high gate speed so I might have to wait until the quarter and move with her. We’ll see how the flow goes,” says the three-time Johnston Cup winner. “There’s no real other stand out in there, nobody will get as much respect on the front end as she would, so there might be lots of flow in the race.”
Ainsworth and his partners, wife Shelley and Martwest Racing Stable of Mississauga, are more concerned about whether Maddy Girl or her recalcitrant alter ego will show up at Windsor Raceway on Sunday evening.
“If she shows up she should be the best,” he says. “The odd start she just doesn’t race up to her potential. She did that in the SBOA Stake (Sept. 20). She warms up good and is feeling good before and after, but just doesn’t race well.”
Trainer George Zirnis occasionally has the same problem with one of two trotting colts he will start in Sunday’s $100,000 contest and that is why the Elmira resident will sit behind Total Mayhem himself and hand off Carrland Buddy’s reins to Jason Gale.
“He’s a very tough horse to drive. Sometimes he gets it in his head to get bully behind the gate and if you get fighting with him, he fights you,” says Zirnis of Promising Catch son Total Mayhem. “He’s one of those horses you have to play with all the time. He can lose it in a hurry, he’s always been like that, even at home.
“The other horse is very, very easy to drive. He’ll do whatever you ask him to. He’s just been a real peach to drive for the last two years.”
Total Mayhem and Zirnis will start from Post 2 in the tenth race on Saturday while Gale and Flak Bait son Carrland Buddy line up at Post 4 and Zirnis hopes both will be a factor in the outcome.
“Total Mayhem kind of hit a bit of a snag in the summertime, but he’s come back in the last five or six weeks and raced pretty good,” says Zirnis, who trains the colt for his partners NFWR Stables of Brampton and Thomas Cousineau of Elmira. “He raced pretty good last week. I didn’t get the best trip with him, he was eighth at the half, but he came storming home real good and was full of trot at the wire. The other horse raced real little, he didn’t get used at all. It was more or less a training mile for him.”
Carrland Buddy, a two-time Gold Final winner at two, is owned by the Smart Cat Stable of Elmira, which includes Windsor residents Dennis and Janet Fairall.
The final Championship features one of the most exciting fields of pacing colts ever assembled for a Grassroots battle. Windsor’s Jack Darling will start Corona Grande from Post 1 in Race 12 and says this group of horses have blurred the line between the Gold Series and the Grassroots.
“It’s a fine line between the Gold and the Grassroots any more. If they hadn’t made that rule change (horses can race in either the Grassroots post season or the Gold Super Final this year, not both) Corona Grande could have gone in the Super Final and I think Bill Budd’s horse (Daylon Frontier) could have raced in it as well,” says the veteran conditioner. “It should be a wild race. Depending on the weather, if it’s a real nice night, I think they’d go around 1:52.”
Corona Grande finished second in his Semifinal and Darling hopes the Camluck colt can crank up the tempo for Sunday’s $100,000 contest after battling a mild virus in recent weeks.
“He’s got to step it up a notch for this week, but I see we drew the rail so that helps,” says Darling, who shares ownership on last year’s Grassroots Champion with Daniel Smith of London. “He was really good there for a little bit in the summer, but he hasn’t been as good in his last few starts. It’s encouraging that he raced better last week. I’m hoping he keeps improving.”
Windsor Raceway sends its first race behind the starting gate at 6:30 pm on Sunday and the three-year-old Grassroots stars will pump up the excitement level in Races 6, 8, 10 and 12.