It’s Arcangelo’s Challenge, But He’s Got A Deep Field To Beat

It’s a given that every Breeders’ Cup Classic field will be a highly competitive patchwork of proven younger and older athletes, and this November 4 running at Santa Anita is shaping up in that form. The Classic’s pre-entry book tells the tale: Barring the unforeseen, the better-known stakes winners Arcangelo, Mage, Zandon, Geaux Rocket Ride, and White Abarrio can be there to duke it out for the winner’s cut of the $6 million.

A second level of the Classic’s tradition is that the race is occasionally shaped by athletes who are absent, especially those among the immediate class of Triple-Crown running three-year-olds. Nowhere in the Classic’s landscape, for instance, is the Bob Baffert-trained Preakness winner National Treasure, although Baffert does have a solid possible runner in the Breeders’ Cup Challenge series qualifier Arabian Knight.

Similarly, all is deeply quiet now around the superbly talented but somewhat medically challenged Forte, trained by Todd Pletcher, whose foot bruise caused a race-day scratch from the Kentucky Derby, and whose quarter-crack in the front left hoof caused an extended layoff after a fourth-place finish in the Travers. Pletcher and the Forte principals called in master farrier Ian MacKinlay and had the crack patched.

Pletcher has since expressed some doubt about his running Forte in the Travers after such a demanding mile-and-a-half second-place run (in the slop) in the Belmont, but despite that, on October 1, the Classic still looked possible to the trainer. The horse was back to galloping at Churchill, and Pletcher was carefully not working him yet. At that time, Pletcher told the industry press that he hoped to get three good works before the Classic. That does not seem to have happened. Forte’s absence from pre-entries in the Classic is glaring.

The Classic does seem to have drawn a splendid threat to Arcangelo in the Japan-bred and Japan-trained 2023 Dubai World Cup winner Ushba Tesoro, who, notably, was foaled in 2017 but who also only seems to be getting better, or at least, good enough to generate some trackside chatter. The track gossips are giving more than a nod to Ushba Tesoro’s stamina in Dubai, and the fact that the horse, foaled in 2017, is a veteran with some thirty starts, ten of which he won.

We shall address this issue as we take a closer look at Arcangelo during this coming race week, but some of the international cognoscenti seem to think that Arcangelo’s speed figures over the distance leave him vulnerable in this particular Classic. Others are decidedly in favor of him as the man to beat on November 4. The Belmont was a history-making debut for trainer Jena Antonucci, but it was the Travers victory, run in the mud, that really sealed the colt’s reputation in the eyes of the handicappers.