Hallandale Beach, FL (SportsNetwork.com) – Itsaknockout, the 5-1 third pick, was awarded victory over disqualified 9-10 favorite Upstart of Saturday’s $400,000 Fountain of Youth Stakes at Gulfstream Park.<\/p>\n
The 1 1\/16-mile Fountain of Youth serves as the last local prep event for Gulfstream’s Florida Derby on March 28.<\/p>\n
Trained by Todd Pletcher and ridden by Luis Saez, Itsaknockout was racing near the lead through the early going of the race with Upstart to his outside as the eight-horse field of 3-year-olds went up the backstretch.<\/p>\n
Upstart moved three wide around the final turn to take the lead coming into the stretch. The favorite bumped Itsaknockout before going clear. Upstart, ridden by Jose Ortiz, finished 2 3\/4 lengths ahead of Itsaknockout with 63-1 longshot Frammento closing sharply for third.<\/p>\n
An inquiry and objection were lodged against Upstart and the track stewards reversed the order of the top two finishers.<\/p>\n
“I feel bad for the connections of the other horse. He crossed the finish line first, but definitely we got impeded a bit and Luis (Saez) had to stop riding for a couple strides,” Pletcher said.<\/p>\n
Completing the order of finish were Frosted, Gorgeous Bird, Bluegrass Singer, Juan and Bina and Danny Boy.<\/p>\n
“The horse on the inside came out on me and I bumped (Itsaknockout) after that. I bumped him just a little, but I don’t think enough to take me down,” Upstart’s jockey Jose Ortiz said.<\/p>\n
The time for the Fountain of Youth was 1:46.28 on a fast track.<\/p>\n
Owned by Starlight Racing, Itsaknockout won his first stakes race after winning his initial two starts in December and January. The colt picked up $240,000 to bring his bankroll to $286,800.<\/p>\n
Winning the Fountain of Youth gave Itsaknockout his first 50 points toward a start in the Kentucky Derby on May 2.<\/p>\n
“The thing I’m most proud of is for this horse to run this well in his third lifetime start,” Pletcher noted, “first time around two turns and first time in a stake. It was a very, very good effort. He was in between horses in a situation he hasn’t been in before, so it was a big effort.”<\/p>\n
Itsaknockout returned $12.80, $5.00 and $4.00. Upstart paid $2.60 and $2.10, and Frammento paid $12.80 to show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hallandale Beach, FL (SportsNetwork.com) – Itsaknockout, the 5-1 third pick, was awarded victory over disqualified 9-10 favorite Upstart of Saturday’s $400,000 Fountain of Youth Stakes at Gulfstream Park. The 1 1\/16-mile Fountain of Youth serves as the last local prep event for Gulfstream’s Florida Derby on March 28. Trained by Todd Pletcher and ridden by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[330],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29842,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29840\/revisions\/29842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stub.com\/hq\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}