Red Knight (inside) winning last year’s Kentucky Turf Cup. (Coady Photography)
By Jennie Rees
FRANKLIN, Ky. — Trainer Mike Maker says Red Knight and Therapist are similar horses, which is a good thing.
Maker has three chances – and there’s a slim possibility he could have four — to add to his record five victories in the $1.7 million FanDuel Kentucky Turf Cup Saturday at Kentucky Downs. Defending winner Red Knight and Therapist are among them and are the two tepid favorites in an outstanding betting race, with Therapist 7-2 and Red Knight 4-1 in the Global Tote morning line for the Grade 2 stakes at 1 1/2 miles.
Red Knight and Therapist are both chestnut New York-bred geldings who don’t know how to act their age. Red Knight won last year’s Kentucky Turf Cup at age 8, and Therapist will try to do the same this year. Red Knight became a Grade 1 winner for the first time in May, taking Belmont Park’s Man o’ War. Therapist followed by becoming a Grade 1 winner in his last start, the July 22 United Nations at Monmouth Park, in which Red Knight finished third.
Asked if he had a soft spot for an old warrior such as Red Knight, Maker said he does – but the same is true for Therapist, who joined his stable in January via a $50,000 claim.
“He’s a very similar horse,” Maker said, adding of the United Nations, “Therapist was only a length or two in front of him (early in the race). Red Knight might have gotten carried a bit wider than Therapist, but they both had a chance to win turning for home. Therapist, if you watch his gallop out, when he hit the wire, it looked like he hit another gear.”
Maker also will run Paradise Farm Corp. and David Staudacher’s Me and Mr. C, an automatic qualifier for the Kentucky Turf Cup by virtue of winning the 1 1/4-mile prep at Ellis Park but needs four scratches for Red Run to make the 12-horse starting gate.
“Me and Mr. C with any kind of racing luck might be undefeated this year,” Maker said. “We raced him one time at a mile and three-eighths (a drubbing two years ago) so we kind of backed off. He’s a changed horse now, and I expect a big effort from him as well.”
Maker said he sees “no difference” between Red Knight at age 8 and 9.
“He’s a very tough horse,” he said. “He’s acting like he’s 3, not 9. The time off from the Monmouth race till now, he’s tearing the place up.”
While owner-breeder Thomas Egan sent Red Knight to Maker last year, Therapist is another in a long line of claimed horses that the trainer has developed into graded-stakes winners running long on turf.
Current owner Michael Dubb had kept an eye on Therapist over the years, thinking he would do well in New York-bred races but also starter-allowance races when he showed up for a $25,000 claiming price Dec. 30 at Gulfstream Park. Other people apparently had the same idea, and Dubb and Maker lost the “shake” to get the horse.
Then Therapist (who is by the popular New York stallion Freud) showed up in a $50,000 claiming race in his next start. Dubb encouraged Maker to drop another claim, and this time they won the shake.
Because of Gulfstream’s claiming rules, the horse could not go to New York until the end of the meet. They did get in one starter race – a victory in their first race with the horse – but when another such race didn’t get enough entries to be used, Maker instead ran Therapist in Gulfstream’s Grade 2 Pan American at 1 1/2 miles. It was his first career race farther than 1 1/8 miles. The result was another win, and Therapist has only been in marathon turf stakes since.
“What Mike discovered about the horse, like he does with so many horses, is distance,” Dubb said by phone. “Nobody ever tried the horse going long. Obviously one of Mike’s specialities is stretching out, particularly boys, and trying them long. When I looked up the horse’s history, he’d been an eight-time stakes-winner from distances up to a mile. I was like, this horse has class. He’s won open stakes, won state-bred stakes. It was Mike’s idea to stretch him out. Mike said he saw it in the pedigree.”
Sometimes there’s also serendipity at play.
“Mike will tell you that if that second starter we entered had gone, we’d never have been in the PanAmerican,” Dubb said. “I give Mike credit because he’s one of the few trainers who is really not afraid to take a chance at something. He knew the horse was doing very well. We were rewarded for me being a little creative in the claim and Mike being an excellent trainer and willing to take a chance.”
Hall of Famer Javier Castellano, aboard for the 1 3/8-mile United Nations victory at 12-1 odds, will again be in the saddle.
“I’m fortunate I got Javier on him again,” Dubb said. “We actually had a little trouble in the race, but we overcame it. I’m cautiously optimistic that the horse will perform well again.”
Dubb, a Long Island developer who is on the New York Racing Association’s board of directors, will be at Kentucky Downs for the first time this weekend. He also has three horses running Sunday.
“I’m very excited about it,” he said.
With Me and Mr. C being a Florida-bred, Maker’s three horses in the body of the Kentucky Turf Cup will run for $1.3 million, with the race’s other available $400,000 restricted to Kentucky-bred horses. That still makes it the second-richest turf race in America behind Kentucky Downs’ $2 million Mint Millions held on Sept. 2 and outside the Breeders’ Cup.
Maker also won the 2019 Kentucky Turf Cup with Zulu Alpha, in 2017 with Oscar Nominated and in 2015 and 2016 with Da Big Hoss. As the Kentucky Turf Cup has grown, so has the strength of competition. Besides the big purse, the winner of the race receives a fees-paid berth in the $4 million Longines Breeders’ Cup Turf at Santa Anita as part of the Breeders’ Cup Challenge Series.
“The years we had Zulu Alpha and Da Big Hoss, they were kind of standouts,” Maker said. “These are three nice horses, but there’s nine other ones in the race too that are very nice. I think it’s going to come down to who’s got the best trip and the best day.”
