Tag Archive for: Wesley Ward

Wesley Ward: Keep the faith with Outfielder

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Wesley Ward remains optimistic for the future with Outfielder following his fourth-place finish in the Prix Morny at Deauville.

The Speightstown colt created a huge impression when scorching clear on his Churchill Downs debut and while a minor setback put paid to a planned appearance at Royal Ascot, he belatedly travelled to Europe for a Group One contest his American trainer has won on three previous occasions.

After becoming restless in the stalls, leading to him being removed and reloaded, Outfielder slightly missed the break, but soon recovered to lead the six-strong field before faltering late on.

“It was certainly the toughest Morny I’ve ever been in as far as the competition goes,” said Ward.

“He was a little fractious in the gate. We asked to load him late, but they denied us, so we had to go in in post-position order and he reared up and got his foot caught on the side of the gate, according to David Egan.

“David had them back him out, which was good, and maybe he got his composure back when he went back in, but then he broke a tad slow. The good thing is he wasn’t impeded by the horses on either side of him, so in the next couple of strides he got himself back together and off he went.”

Outfielder was certainly not disgraced in being beaten less than three lengths by the unbeaten Venetian Sun, with Coventry Stakes hero Gstaad second and runaway Rose Bowl winner Wise Approach third.

Ward was pleased with the performance of his youngster given he lacked the experience of his rivals.

He added: “It was such a tough race and I was proud of the way he fought on, there were just three horses better than him, but he ran a good race considering he’d only had one run whereas the others had had multiple runs.

“Given he hadn’t had another start since his maiden and this was also his first time out of Kentucky, the others had a little bit of an experience edge on him, so I was proud he didn’t throw in the towel and he was only beaten a couple of lengths by the toughest two-year-olds in Europe.

“It was very sporting of my partners Kia (Joorabchian) and Jayson Werth to take them on as you really don’t know who you’re taking on until you’re there and we would certainly have liked a prep run going into it but we didn’t have time for one.

“He certainly gave a good account of himself, he ran a valiant race I think and he’s now back in the States, so we’ll get him home and have a meeting with the owners and my partners and make a new plan.”

The Washington-based trainer is unsure what the rest of the year has in store for Outfielder, but did raise the possibility of him being stepped up in distance at some stage.

He said: “There’s a little bit of unknown with this guy. I originally never intended to run him early in the year, but when we started breezing him in April he had some eye-opening breezes and instead of continuing to work him we put him in a race and he bounded away from them, as everyone knows.

“But really, if you look at him, you’d think he’d want to go around two turns here in America, so we’ll just see how he is after this big effort and make a new plan. Whether that be sprinting or whether that means stretching out (in trip) a little bit, I’m sure he’ll tell us with his morning breezes.”

Wesley Ward ‘excited’ to mount Morny challenge with Outfielder

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Outfielder is on his way to France with the aim of providing American trainer Wesley Ward with a fourth victory in the Prix Morny at Deauville on Sunday week.

The Speightstown colt made a huge impression on his racecourse debut at Churchill Downs in May and looked tailor-made to add to Ward’s tally of a dozen winners at Royal Ascot.

However, he was ruled out of the the trip to Britain following a late setback and for the first time in a decade his trainer did not have a runner at the summer showpiece meeting in Berkshire.

But two months on, Ward is gunning for more Group One glory on European soil in a race he has previously won with No Nay Never (2013), Lady Aurelia (2016) and Campanelle (2020).

“Outfielder left Keeneland yesterday (Wednesday), so away we go,” he said.

“He’s flying right now, doing great and everything is wonderful. He’s had some excellent morning breezes and I’m so excited to get this guy going.

“He won bounding away on his only start. It was a little bit of a rush job to get him to Ascot and he told us he hadn’t quite recovered from his first effort to be ready for his next, but now he’s ready.”

No Nay Never, Lady Aurelia and Campanelle had all struck Royal Ascot gold before following up at Deauville and while Ward admits Outfielder lacks that high-level match practice, he feels there is some upside in the fact he will line up fresh.

“He doesn’t have quite the experience the others did because the others had two runs. They’d all run at home and run at Ascot,” the trainer added.

“This horse does have a bit better spacing in that all the others came back to America after Ascot and then had to travel again back to France, so he’s got better spacing from race to race.

“His last workout was an eye-opener at Keeneland. He worked in company with a horse called Longshoreman, who is out of Lady Pauline, who actually ran at Ascot in a race prior to the Royal meeting a few years ago and finished second.

“Longshoreman finished second on his debut at Keeneland and then bounded away by many lengths, just like Outfielder did, so when we worked them together last week I was kind of unsure what would happen, but Outfielder just ran away from him.

“He would relish fast ground, that’s for sure. It’s always a question mark at Deauville, but right now he’s doing great and we’re excited about running him.”

Ward is named as a part-owner of Outfielder alongside Kia Joorabchian’s Amo Racing operation and former professional baseball player Jayson Werth, who is set to make the trip to France.

Ward, who also confirmed Amo Racing’s retained rider David Egan is set to be on board, said: “Jayson is a wonderful guy and it’s great to have a great sportsman like him be involved in such a nice horse. We’re excited about that as well.”

Wesley Ward absent from Royal Ascot this year

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For the first time in well over a decade Wesley Ward will not saddle a runner at Royal Ascot, with his exciting juvenile Outfielder ruled out of the showpiece meeting following a late setback.

Hugely impressive on his Churchill Downs debut, the Speightstown colt looked a major contender for the Norfolk Stakes but will not be making the trip across the Atlantic.

Ward said: “He had a a nice breeze yesterday (Tuesday) on the grass here in Keeneland and unfortunately he came out with just a hair of a shin (problem), which 90 per cent of all two-year-olds get and it’s just unfortunate it’s right on the heels of Ascot.

“We’re here and not over there though, that’s one good thing. He didn’t have to leave Keeneland, so that was good.”

Part-owned by Amo Racing, Outfielder could still be seen in action on European soil this summer, with August’s Prix Morny at Deauville – a Group One Ward has previously won with No Nay Never (2013), Lady Aurelia (2016) and Campanelle (2020) – under consideration.

“Our original plan was to go for the Norfolk and then the Prix Morny, so we’ll just train him into the Morny if all goes to plan,” the trainer added.

Few in Europe had heard of Washington-born Ward when he first came to Ascot in 2009, but it did not take him long to make a big impression, with Strike The Tiger becoming the first American-trained horse to win at the Royal meeting when landing the Windsor Castle Stakes.

The very next day Ward was on the mark again with Jealous Again in the Queen Mary and he has sent horses to Berkshire in all but one of the subsequent 14 years, amassing a dozen winners in the process.

Wesley Ward (right) celebrating at Royal Ascot
Wesley Ward (right) celebrating at Royal Ascot (John Walton/PA)

The ebullient handler will be conspicuous by his absence in 2025, but he is not too downbeat.

“I’ll still enjoy watching it here, that’s for sure,” he said.

“This was the 16th year we were getting ready to go over there. My eldest son Riley has been going every year since I started and he’s got all these friends that he’s met that go back and forward between American and the the UK, so he’s the one that’s gutted the most out of the whole family.

“Outfielder was obviously meant to be making the trip and we had another couple lined up and had some breezes on Monday, but while the breezes were good they weren’t Royal Ascot-winning good.

“You know me, I’m pretty positive and excited, but if I’m not thinking they’ve got big chances when it’s a lot of money to go over there for the owners… I want to make sure at least going into it that you think you have a winner.”

Monday Musings: Time Flying By

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Logic told me time would pass slowly during lock-down. Five weeks in, it’s definitely speeded up, writes Tony Stafford. I spoke to my son twice last week, briefly on Sunday and then again for a few minutes more on Friday and I swore that there could only have been a couple of days between the two contacts.

Twin came around on BBC4 again on Saturday evening in my favourite 9 p.m. international drama slot and will already be finished by next weekend. Thankfully I’ve now joined BBC I-Player so I can have a second look on the confusing bits of that rapidly-evolving and brain-challenging eight-part (two each week) Norwegian epic when I get some time. I was very disappointed that Spiral, a series of series I most wanted to see and that motivated my joining, is not on the list.

The other evening it was still light when the Thursday 8 p.m. clapping reverberated from the flats all around. Racing fans in the UK, denied so much since the shut-down on March 18 and more so in Ireland, will have lost most markedly; along with the mainstream we all are aware of, the accelerating number of evening meetings, many of them over jumps, that bolster the normal spring racing menu have also been cancelled. Just to let you know, the days start getting shorter in nine weeks’ time!

The Racing Post’s online-only newspaper carries the cards, like Gulfstream Park and Tampa Bay, that have kept racing going in Florida. Like everyone else, the Post included, I expected the Wesley Ward juveniles on show at Gulfstream on successive early evenings last week to do a Lady Aurelia and blow away the opposition.

But both on Thursday and Friday, first the 30-100 shot Lime, a daughter of Iqbaal, and then Golden Pal, 1-2 (by Uncle Mo), contrived to show the trademark Ward early pace only to succumb in almost identical fashion to a single stronger finisher even though their races were over only four and a half furlongs.

This pair was reportedly among the planned Ward annual contingent for Royal Ascot but first that spectator-free entity needs to be confirmed as does secondly that overseas runners may be accepted if it does. Should they come, I’m sure the traditional fear in which they are held by home trainers may have been a little diluted, although there’s plenty of time for Wesley to build some of that extra physical maturity that his juvenile challengers always seem to display.

I’ve been intrigued by the identity of today’s evening offering at Will Rogers Downs and thought it might justify a little investigating. I wasn’t at all prepared for what I readily discovered on the web. Will Rogers Downs is a gaming (principally, of course) and horse racing venue in Rogers County, close to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is operated by the Cherokee Nation.

That administrative area encompasses 14 counties in North-East Oklahoma and a local population of around 200,000 in one way or another descended mainly from Cherokee and two other Native American tribes.

If that wasn’t unusual enough, the jockeys and trainers will be totally unknown to most of us, unlike the stars who descend on Florida each winter and spring, especially with New York firmly shut down. For the record, Floyd Wethey, Jr. is the top rider so far in 2020 and Scott Young is leading trainer. Tonight’s 10-race card offers one quite valuable prize, a near £25k to the winner fillies and mares race. I won’t put forward a potential winner.

The gaming provides the prizemoney and the track keeps a chunk of all the race wagering. Gaming is also keeping the UK bookmaking companies going, and if the number of advertisements for casino betting that we see in the commercial breaks on most channels nowadays is indicative of betting levels in these odd times, gambling is probably going off the charts.

How the BHA must wish it could get its claws on even a small percentage of that massive cake, not that it would be right to do so (as we saw with the FOBT fiasco). Maybe they should ask Captain Tom to do a sponsored walking-frame-push around the Ascot paddock on his 100th birthday on Thursday next week while singing his chart-topping duet with Michael Ball of You’ll Never Walk Alone? The £23 million (probably more by the time you read this) by which his exploits will be aiding the NHS efforts exceeds the not-insignificant £22 million that the Levy Board is targeting to help racecourses and others through their troubled financial times.

Yesterday we went for a fourth walk of the lockdown, this time forsaking the Olympic Park, for the newly (at Easter) re-opened Victoria Park, which is in the opposite direction. The park had been closed for some time after that initial period when sunbathing and all the other indicators of holidays in good weather in the summertime caused a Government re-think. Everyone was doing the keep-out-of-the-way six-feet walk yesterday; there is no cycling and all the dogs including our Yorkie Josephina were on a lead.

What was obvious, though, was that while the ground is not yet showing any real suggestion of much new growth, the five weeks of drought, following hard on the months of near waterlogging, has already brought great cracks in the turf at some places.

Hughie Morrison has been kindly sending me a brief video every Friday of Ray Tooth’s big homebred and still unraced three-year-old Bogeyman going through his paces. Each week they have been working on the wonderful grass gallops, developed over many years by the Cundell family but now owned and managed by Sir James Dyson.

The Victoria Park phenomenon is extending into Berkshire as the colour of the terrain seems to be lightening week on week. How ironic, with barely a day’s racing after the turn of the year and before Cheltenham being staged on anything but soft or heavy ground, unless we get some rain soon, it will be firm or as near as makes no difference when we resume. Expect to see stand-pipes in the streets by July.

Finally, after hearing that he thinks racing should start as soon as possible – Nick Rust’s line at the weekend too – it was salutary that Mark Johnston has subsequently revealed he is in isolation at home after being quite ill after contracting Covid-19. It must be so frustrating, frightening even, with the Flat season still to start, for Britain’s winning-most trainer that the new norm is so alien. I’m sure that everyone in racing will be wishing Mark, wife Deirdre and their family and staff all the best in the coming trying days.

- TS