Thursday Thoughts with Jason Beem for Sept. 4, 2025

A good Thursday morning to you all! Hope everyone had a good holiday weekend as we start the shift into fall racing. I know that summer technically goes until the latter part of September, but to me it always feels like post Labor day there’s a real shift in everything. Kids are back to school, football starts, Saratoga ends. It’s fall, even though it’s supposed to be 90 degrees here in Richmond for our Old Dominion Derby day this weekend. 

I wanted to write a little bit about the Old Dominion Derby (G3) and this weekend’s Super Derby, and their meandering paths to their current forms. Let’s start with the Old Dominion Derby, which for all intents and purposes is the same race and same spot on the calendar as the Virginia Derby always was. It just has a new name. The Virginia Derby was always a late summer/early fall turf race with a Grade 3 tag. Earlier this year, it became a Kentucky Derby qualifier on the main track in the spring, so the race formerly known as the Virginia Derby needed a new name. And the Old Dominion Derby was born. But it isn’t the first name change for this race. 

The race began as the Virginia Derby back in October of 1998. Colonial opened in 1997, but that first year was just dirt racing. So the Virginia Derby as a turf event began in 1998 and within a few years received a Grade 3 assignment. Winners like Gio Ponti, Kitten’s Joy, and English Channel (all named champion turf horse) gave the race big time credibility. It had been elevated to Grade 2 status when Colonial Downs shuttered in 2013, and the race was subsequently moved to Laurel Park and renamed the Commonwealth Derby. 

Graham Motion won the final Commonwealth Derby in 2017 with Just Howard, and the race was not held in 2018 as plans to reopen Colonial Downs took shape. In 2019, Motion won with English Bee and the Virginia Derby was cancelled in 2020 when the pandemic cut the meet short. Motion won again in 2021 with Wootten Asset, so Motion trained every winner for a five-year span, even though it was only three runnings. 

The last two Virginia Derby winners, Integration and Deterministic, have gone to record multiple graded stakes victories, with Deterministic winning the Manhattan (G1) and Fourstardave (G1) in his last two outings. Saturday will be the first running of the newest incarnation of this race, the Old Dominion Derby. 

Down in Shreveport, Louisiana, they’ll conduct Saturday's Super Derby once again at Louisiana Downs for the second time since a three-year post pandemic break. Inaugurated in 1980, the Super Derby very soon after became a major Breeders’ Cup prep, as winners like Gate Dancer, Alysheba, Seeking the Gold, and Sunday Silence all parlayed Super Derby wins into major successes down the road in the 1980s. Tiznow won the 2000 edition prior to the first of back-to-back Breeders' Cup Classic (G1) wins in 2000. 

It’s a race with a great history that kind of fell on tough times in the 2010s as it lost its grading and the purse went down quite a bit. They even ran it on turf in 2017. I’m glad to see the Super Derby making a comeback and hope it can find some bit of its past glory. Even if it doesn’t become a big race on the national scene again, it’s important for these markets to have a marquee event for the local fans and to get some national eyeballs on their track. 

Everyone have a great weekend!