G3-Placed Mare Defeated by Soul of an Angel Last Time Out
Special 11:50 A.M. Post Time for Saturday’s 10-Race Program
LAUREL, MD – After running into a subsequent Breeders’ Cup winner as well as her own multiple stakes-winning stablemate last time out, Skull Racing’s Battle Cry will get a modest class break when she races for the 40th time and just the fifth outside her native South Florida in Saturday’s $100,000 Thirty Eight Go Go at Laurel Park.
The 14th running of the 1 1/16-mile Thirty Eight Go Go for fillies and mares 3 and up is the last of three $100,000 stakes on a 10-race program following the James F. Lewis III for 2-year-olds and Smart Halo for 2-year-old fillies, both sprinting six furlongs.
First race post time is 11:50 a.m.
Based at Gulfstream Park, Battle Cry is cross-entered in Friday’s Treasure Chest going one mile at Delta Downs, but trainer Victor Barboza Jr. supplemented his 6-year-old mare to the Thirty Eight Go Go to take advantage of the longer distance.
“She’s going to run in Maryland,” Barboza said. “She ran a very good race last time, but I think she is even better going the two turns.”
Last time was the seven-furlong Princess Rooney (G3) Sept. 21 at Gulfstream where Battle Cry was sent off at odds of 61-1 and wound up third, 2 ½ lengths shy of Barboza-trained runner-up Beth’s Dream – winner of Laurel’s 2023 Heavenly Cause – and less than six behind Soul of an Angel, who subsequently upset the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint (G1) Nov. 2 at Del Mar.
“The last race was a very, very good race. Soul of an Angel is one of the best mares around as she showed the other day,” Barboza said. “I think my mare is very good, too.”
Battle Cry was claimed for $20,000 in the spring of 2022 and has won nine of 17 starts since, racing on both dirt and all-weather Tapeta including a pair of three-race win streaks, the most recent coming between last August and October. The 13-time career winner and earner of just under $400,000 has made just two starts this year, returning from 6 ½ months away to finish fifth to Beth’s Dream in the June 23 My Pal Chrisy handicap as a prep for the Princess Rooney.
“Battle Cry has been a very consistent mare. She runs on Tapeta, she runs on dirt, she runs on the sloppy track,” Barboza said. “She loves a sloppy track. I think she’ll run two more times and then become a broodmare.”
Dianne Stern’s 4-year-old Virginia homebred Foxy Junior chases a third straight win and sixth in seven starts this year for Penn National-based trainer Bernie Houghton. She went two-for-eight in 2023 including a third in the Fort Indiantown Gap before embarking on her breakout season.
Foxy Junior won a trio of optional claiming allowances by 15 ¼ combined lengths to open 2024 before being a late-running fourth in the Princess of Sylmar going a mile and 70 yards on Presque Isle Downs’ all-weather surface June 29.
“We gave her time off in the wintertime like we usually do and for some reason she just came back so good. She was training real good and, I don’t know, it all just came together for her this year,” Houghton said. “She won those allowance races back-to-back and every day she just seemed to get better and better. She’s coming into this race real good, too. She’s sharp and ready to go.”
Foxy Junior became a stakes winner in Parx’s one-mile, 70-yard Plum Pretty against fellow Pennsylvania-breds Sept. 21 and last out captured the seven-furlong Maryland Million Distaff by three-quarters of a length Oct. 12, her only prior race at Laurel.
“I was a little nervous about the seven-eighths; I’m not near as nervous about the two turns because she’s used to that,” Houghton said. “Before the Maryland Million I was thinking she’s got some speed if she needs it, too. She broke sharp that day and just sat right in behind them and took the lead when she wanted to.”
It was the fourth Distaff win for Houghton following Classy Coco in 2014 and local favorite Crabcakes, who won back-to-back editions in 2017 and 2018 for his aunt, late longtime owner and breeder Elizabeth ‘Binnie’ Houghton.
“I loved Crabcakes. In my tack room I still have the win picture of her after that race,” he said of the Maryland Million. “She was special.”
Pine Brook Farm’s Foggy Night is looking for her first win of 2024 after notching three wins and two seconds from seven starts last year including stakes victories in the Delaware Oaks (G3) and Cathryn Sophia and a second in the Monmouth Oaks (G2). Trained by Robert E. ‘Butch’ Reid Jr., she exits a runner-up finish in a seven-furlong optional claiming allowance Oct. 19 at her home track of Parx.
Like Battle Cry, ZWP Stable Inc. and Non Stop Stable’s 6-year-old mare Malibu Beauty has also raced 39 times and the Maryland homebred owns 12 wins and $744,699 in purse earnings. Nineteen of her starts have come at Laurel where she has a record of 5-3-3 including three of her six stakes victories, and she was fourth as the favorite to fellow multiple stakes winner Hybrid Eclipse in last year’s Thirty Eight Go Go.
Kissedbyanangel, the 2023 Maryland Juvenile Filly winner that was fourth to Foxy Junior in the Distaff; six-time winning stablemate Ginger Girl; stakes-placed Continentalcongres and well-traveled Sandra D complete the field.
The Thirty Eight Go Go honors the two-time Maryland-bred champion bred and trained by Hall of Famer King Leatherbury. Eight of her 10 career wins came in stakes including the Gardenia (G2), Tempted (G3) and Maryland Million Lassie in 1987 and three consecutive runnings of the Geisha (1988-90).
Harold Queen’s Florida homebred Sheer Drama, trained by South Florida-based David Fawkes, earned her first career stakes victory in the 2014 Thirty Eight Go Go before going on to become a three-time Grade 1 winner with more than $1.6 million in purse earnings.