Trail of Gold delivered what looked to be an unlikely victory in the latest leg of the New York Stallion Series races at Saratoga on Wednesday evening, coming from last to first under a strong drive from Irad Ortiz to win by 2-lengths. Racing on the inner loop, Ortiz was forced to drop in at the back of the 6-runner field after Trail of Gold ran the slowest opening furlong (12.74s) leaving the stalls. Still last at the end of the back stretch, Ortiz settled down into the drive position to force his mount wide off the home turn. Once straightened up, Trail of Gold closed strongly on the leaders with the fastest 6th, 7th and 8th furlongs of the race to ultimately win going away. A top speed of 39.59 mph ranked only 4th go 6, but at an average of 25.72 ft, the daughter of Solomini had the longest stride in the field (next best Boston’s Phinest 24.38 ft) and on such a tight course, she did remarkably well to keep herself in contention before being able to lengthen in the closing stages. Galloping on through the line, Trail of Gold recorded a run-out speed of 37.29 mph (ranked 1st) to complete an impressive performance. On each of her last 4 starts, Trail of Gold has recorded the longest average stride length in the field and it would be fair to assume that she may yet be open to further improvement on a more galloping track where she can use her long stride to better effect. This was a 3rd win in 10 starts for David Donk’s 3-year-old and both successes on the turf have come in races that weren’t run to suit where she has made her ground from the rear of the field. Given that she ran the fastest furlong of the entire race in the closing stages (8th furlong 11.59s) and her average strdie frequency reached a race peak of 2.22 per second at the finish, there is every reason to believe that she has more improvement to come.

It’s hard to put a number on this form, especially given that the rest of the field has finished in a bit of a heap. However, the placed horses, Nonna Lynne and Hangover Heaven both came into this race on the back of maiden success at this course and given that they both raced closer to the pace with higher strdie frequency figures, so there’s no obvious excuse for either of them. The fact that Trail of Gold has been able to overcome the track bias and still found the late speed to run them down can only be seen as a positive and she is clearly the horse to take from Wednesday’s feature race.