LOUISVILLE — West Point Stable’s 3-year-old filly Flashy Gray, runner-up in the Honeybee and Fair Grounds Oaks in her last two starts for trainer Bill Mott, was scratched from tomorrow’s $1 million Kentucky Oaks yesterday after suffering a foot bruise.
That reduces the Oaks field to 10, four of them trained by Todd Pletcher, who also has five of the 20 horses in the Kentucky Derby.
* Rick Pitino, coach of the NCAA men’s basketball champion Louisville Cardinals, paid a visit to Barn 45 on the Churchill Downs backstretch yesterday morning to visit Derby contender Goldencents and his trainer, Doug O’Neill. Pitino, a part-owner of two previous Derby contenders — Halory Hunter, fourth in 1998, and AP Valentine, seventh in 2001 — has a five-percent share in Goldencents, winner of the Santa Anita Derby.
Accompanying Pitino was Gorgui Dieng, Louisville’s 6-foot-11 center. Later in the day, Pitino was part of a foursome including O’Neill, his brother Dennis, and another of Goldencents’ owners, Dave Kenny, that tee’d off at Louisville’s Valhalla Golf Club, the site of Ryder Cups and PGA Championships.
* Only two geldings have won the Derby since Clyde Van Dusen in 1929, and both will be on display today at the Kentucky Derby Museum: Funny Cide, who upset Empire Maker at 12-1 in 2003, and Mine That Bird, the 50-1 shocker in 2009.
Mine That Bird, who was retired to the Roswell, N.M., farm of his owner after failing to hit the board in four starts as a 4-year-old, is currently residing at the museum through July 4. Funny Cide will van up from his retirement home at the Kentucky Horse Park outside Lexington, Ky., for the 10th anniversary of his Derby victory.
Mine That Bird’s trainer, Chip Woolley, is on-hand at Churchill this week, complete with black Stetson and fu-manchu mustache, but without the crutches. Woolley is portrayed by actor Skeet Ulrich in the upcoming movie of Mine That Bird’s improbable victory, appropriately called “50-1.”