Monday Morning Message for Sept. 8, 2025

Jason discusses some highlights from the weekend of racing including the season endings of Del Mar and Emerald Downs. 

A good Monday morning to you all! Hope everyone had a good weekend and stayed a bit drier than we did for the last couple races Saturday at Colonial Downs. 

The racing gods have quite the timing as we hadn’t so much as had a drop of rain during the races in about a month, and of course 20 minutes before the Old Dominion Oaks and Derby (G3), the skies opened up and it absolutely poured. Good news was that a break in the storm allowed us to run both races, and we saw some nice performances including World Beater who dominated the Derby. 

This weekend also brought the end of the Emerald Downs and Del Mar summer meetings. I was able to get to the closing weekend last year at Emerald and was able to catch the Gottstein Futurity, which is one of my favorite races there in Seattle. The Gottstein for years has been the championship two-year-old race in Seattle, going back to Longacres as it was named after the founder of the track, Joe Gottstein. Joe even had a house at Longacres behind the toteboard with a pool to swim in during the summer. How cool is that! 

The race has a great history though, and I’m glad that Emerald Downs continues that history. My favorite running of the race at Emerald was back in 2005 when Schoolin You and Raise the Bluff squared off in an epic stretch battle that saw Schoolin You win by a neck. My sister was good friends with the owners of Schoolin You, and it’s one of the few times she and I got to go to the track together, so I’m sure that adds to the specialness of it for me. This year’s race kind of fell apart, and it was Robin Racer who had to split horses a couple of times to get the win for trainer Tom Wenzel, who has been a staple of stakes racing at Emerald Downs for decades now. 

There’s something about this time of year for two-year-old racing that to me is the best part of the juvenile campaign. To be honest, all the 4 1/2-furlong Keeneland races and the early summer five-furlong sprints do nothing for me. I think they reward a certain type of training more than they do horse quality. But now we see them starting to stretch out to two turns, and it’s amazing how fast they are changing and growing and developing. 

You’ll see horses make big leaps forward between starts. Heck, just this weekend we saw Dreaming of Alys make her turf debut in the Del Mar Juvenile Fillies Turf and light up the board at odds of over 60-1! New surface, longer distance, so many variables in these juvenile races that I think they are so much more interesting than the all speed races that most of them graduated in earlier this spring. 

Another cool part of this time of year for two-year-olds is that I think more of the trainers are willing to run them in the final round of preps before the Breeders’ Cup. So many of the older horses now have gotten into that “train up to” mode, and it’s so disheartening as a fan because the late September and early October preps have always been some of my favorite races of the year. The Champagne (G1) and Frizette (G1) and the turf equivalents both out East and West are always super-fun races, and hopefully they stay full in the starting gates as we build towards the Breeders' Cup. 

We’ve certainly turned the corner now with Del Mar and Saratoga done. The lead up now all focuses towards Del Mar as we’re less than two months away from the big weekend in early November. Should be a fun couple of months! 

Good luck out there this week!