Spain Carries Extra Load

The Molly Pitcher, a $300,000 race to be run Saturday at Monmouth Park in New Jersey, is listed as a handicap. Boy, is it.

Spain, the high weight and expected favorite in the Molly Pitcher, is six weeks pregnant. The other four fillies and mares in the race--we have to take them at their word on this--have yet to be introduced to stallions.

On top of her condition, Spain has been assigned 122 pounds--jockey Jorge Chavez and equipment--for the Molly Pitcher, which is three to 11 pounds more than her rivals. Sean Greely, the racing secretary at Monmouth, did not consider that Spain had been successfully bred to Storm Cat--at $500,000, the world’s most expensive sire--at Overbrook Farm in Lexington, Ky., on May 15. Spain’s weight assignment is based on the fact that the 5-year-old mare has won her last two races, is a Breeders’ Cup distaff winner and has earned $3.5 million, more than any female in the history of U.S. racing.

It is not completely unusual for mares in foal to continue racing, although examples of such high-profile mares as Spain staying on the track are rare. Caressing, a 4-year-old filly, was bred to Fusaichi Pegasus, the 2000 Kentucky Derby winner, on April 21 and has resumed training. In 1992, according to Blood-Horse magazine, the 6-year-old Fit For A Queen was bred to Gulch in May and ran four times, all in stakes, after that. After three consecutive second-place finishes, Fit For A Queen won the Turfway Budweiser Breeders’ Cup Stakes at Turfway Park, when she was four months pregnant.

Spain was returned to trainer Wayne Lukas’ barn at Churchill Downs three days after she was bred to Storm Cat. The gestation period for thoroughbreds is 11 months. Mares’ embryos are slow developing in the first months, and veterinarians have said that racing a mare up to six months after she has been bred will cause no harm.

Spain has already run one time with foal, winning the $329,400 Fleur de Lis Handicap at Churchill Downs on June 15. “She looked terrific,” Lukas said after that race. “She looked like she had blossomed.”

Six weeks before that race--and 12 days before she was bred--Spain won the Louisville Handicap at Churchill, ending an 11-race losing streak and breaking the earnings record set by Serena’s Song, another distaffer trained by Lukas. Chasing Serena’s Song’s $3.2-million record was one of the reasons Spain had been kept in training; since her Breeders’ Cup win, at 55-1, at Churchill in November 2000, she had fallen off her form badly and had apparently forgotten how to win. But now, once before pregnancy and once since, she has consecutive victories for the first time since the summer of 2000.

After the Molly Pitcher, Spain is expected to run at least twice more, in the Go For Wand Stakes on July 28 and the Personal Ensign on Aug. 23. Both races are at Saratoga. Whether she can become one of those Breeders’ Cup rarities, a horse who runs in those races a third time, is up in the air. In her second Breeders’ Cup Distaff, last October at Belmont Park, Spain lost by a head to Unbridled Elaine. This year’s Breeders’ Cup will be run on Oct. 26 at Arlington Park, and Spain would be more than five months pregnant by then. Lukas said that the Breeders’ Cup decision would be made by Prince Ahmed bin Salman’s Thoroughbred Corp., which bred and races Spain.

Spain is a daughter of the Lukas-trained Thunder Gulch, the 1995 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, and Drina, a stakes-winning mare who raced in the early 1990s and earned $205,682. Thunder Gulch, a son of Gulch and a Kentucky-based stallion who stood for an $80,000 fee this breeding season, has been good for the prince. He was not a popular stud at the start, when his fee was $40,000. His first crop--66 horses who got to the races--won only 18 races and earned less than $160,000. But then Spain and Salman’s Point Given, winner of last year’s Preakness and Belmont, came along.

Combined, Spain and Point Given have earned almost $7.5 million. Point Given is at stud, retired last August because of a tendon injury, but Spain, who has nine wins, nine seconds and six thirds, is still going, at least for two or three more races. The Molly Pitcher will be her 35th start. It’s a handicap, all right.

*

Attempting to keep up with her stablemate Azeri, Astra will carry high weight of 124 pounds, spotting her eight rivals between eight and 12 pounds, in Saturday’s $250,000 Beverly Hills Handicap. Azeri, who has seven wins and one second in eight starts, won the Vanity Handicap Saturday. Astra, with 10 wins in 14 races, can become the first back-to-back winner of the Beverly Hills since Flawlessly in 1992-93.... Corey Nakatani, recovering from a concussion suffered in a spill on May 2, is scheduled to resume riding next week.... In his first workout since the Belmont, War Emblem went three furlongs in :35 4/5 at Santa Anita on Wednesday.... Milwaukee Brew, who’ll be favored in the $750,000 Hollywood Gold Cup on July 14, worked five furlongs in 1:00 4/5.