Gantry likely to have one prep for BC Sprint; Fort Loudon could stretch out

Gantry likely to have one prep for BC Sprint; Fort Loudon

could stretch out

by Brisnet.com

The morning after his commanding five-length victory in the Grade 2 Smile

Sprint, Brittlyn Stable's Gantry gave the appearance of a horse that had done

very little the day before, holding a commanding presence over barn 77 in the

Calder stable area Sunday.

"He's been on his toes all morning walking around the barn and looking

absolutely great," trainer Ron Faucheux said. "I'm going back to Louisiana

today, and he'll van back to the Evangeline Training Center tomorrow where we'll

give him a little time off."

With his victory in the Smile Sprint, Gantry not only captured the first

graded stakes of his career, he also earned a berth in this year's Breeders' Cup

Sprint, held at Santa Anita in early November, as the Smile was a Breeders' Cup

Challenge "Win and You're In" Series race for the Sprint division.

"That's the plan," Faucheux said when asked if an early November trip to

California is now in the works for Gantry. "We plan on being there."

And Faucheux has shown the ability to not only possess a plan, but to execute

one flawlessly, with his decision to ship Gantry to Calder June 28, a full nine

days in advance of the Smile, coming by design.

"We knew we wanted to get him here a little early to get him acclimated to

the new surroundings and to make sure he liked the track. And then on race day,

he performed the way we hoped he had. It's great when a plan works to

perfection."

Faucheux will now enter the planning stage for Gantry's next main target, the

aforementioned Breeders' Cup Sprint, and the trainer is looking to take a

relatively light path to Arcadia, California, with just one prep race likely for

the five-year-old son of Pulpit.

"We're going to take things easy with him," Faucheux explained. "We want to

run him once before the Breeders' Cup and we'll just have to look around

Louisiana and elsewhere to see what race that will be. But I think he runs his

best races when he's a little fresh, and with the Breeders' Cup as the goal now,

we aren't going to take too much out of him before then."

Such a goal was surely not expected last fall when Gantry was purchased

privately after an allowance win at Belmont with a small stakes on the Fair

Grounds racing calendar the intended goal.

"I said this yesterday, but it's true; my owner was just looking to get a

horse for the Thanksgiving Day Handicap last year; that's what we bought him

for," Faucheux stated. "We knew he would be a good dirt sprinter, but that's the

race we wanted to win, and we did. Then we won two other stakes down there, and

now the race yesterday. And from that Thanksgiving Day Handicap horse, it looks

like we got a Breeders' Cup Sprint horse instead. That's pretty amazing."

Earlier on Calder's Summit of Speed program, a possible Breeders' Cup Sprint

contender suffered defeat at the hooves of locally-based Fort Loudon in the

Grade 3 Carry Back. All was well in trainer Stanley Gold's barn the morning

after the Awesome of Course sophomore surged past Grade 2 winner and Sprint

hopeful Trinniberg to upset the six-furlong Carry Back.

"He came back great and everything was good this morning," Gold said.

And with the memories of Saturday's race still fresh in his mind, Gold was

happy to discuss successful race strategy, as drawn up by the conditioner and

executed to perfection by jockey Fernando Jara.

"I knew if we let Trinniberg go, he would be gone," Gold said. "Trinniberg

had earned his reputation, and there was no sense letting him do what he wanted.

"So I told Fernando to keep close at all times. We had never tried that with

him before, but if we didn't, we couldn't win the race. So it was kind of like

an 'all-or-nothing situation.' We could sit back and let him get away from us,

and most likely we'd be running for second, or we could go after him and see

what happened. You saw what we did, and it worked."

With his victory in the Carry Back, Fort Loudon has now won three straight

six-furlong stakes at Calder and has all the looks of a top-flight sprinter. And

while Gold has immediate plans to keep the bay colt in one-turn races, thoughts

of stretching him out again are present.

Though Fort Loudon swept the Florida Stallion Stakes series at Calder,

including the 1 1/16-mile In Reality division, his other four attempts past

eight furlongs resulted in unplaced finishes in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile,

Grade 3 Holy Bull, Grade 2 Fountain of Youth and Grade 1 Florida Derby.

"Right now we'll keep him in shorter races, but distance races aren't out of

the question somewhere down the line," Gold said. "People forget that in races

like the Breeders' Cup and the ones he ran in at Gulfstream Park, he was running

with the absolute best horses of his generation, and he wasn't getting beat all

that bad.

"That's one of the reasons I don't buy into this 'horse for a course' idea

with him," Gold continued. "Take a look at those races he ran elsewhere and look

at some of the horses that were in those races. And then look at how he ran; he

was competitive. That shows me that he's a good horse regardless of where he

runs."

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