Preakness News & Notes

Talkin Adds Weight, Muscle Heading into Preakess Stakes
Russell on Preakness Contender Taj Mahal: ‘He’s That Guy’
Pretty Boy Miah to Work Saturday with Preakness in Mind
Record 18 Horses Contested 1928 Preakness, Won by Victorian

LAUREL, MD – Reeves Thoroughbred Racing, Pine Racing Stables, Legendary Thoroughbreds, Belmar Racing and Breeding and R. A. Hill Stable’s Grade 1-placed Talkin will ultimately do the talking, but in the meantime trainer Danny Gargan is thrilled how the Good Magic colt is doing coming into the 151st Preakness Stakes (G1) May 16 at Laurel Park.

Gargan said he doesn’t yet have a rider confirmed but that he will be “one of the top riders in the country.” Joel Rosario, who rode Talkin in his two starts this year, is back in California, the trainer said.

Talkin has continued training at Keeneland Race Course in Lexington, Ky. since he finished a well-beaten third in the April 4 Blue Grass (G1). Further Ado won by 11 lengths that day, with Talkin 1 3/4 lengths behind runner-up Ottinho.

“He’s doing really, really well,” Gargan said by phone Wednesday. “He’s not a huge horse, but he’s eating really well. He’s put on weight [and] he’s put on muscle since his last race. We were behind the 8-ball when they brought him back, because he came in after being sick and needed some time off. We had to give him a race to get him started in Tampa.”

Talkin finished fifth in the Tampa Bay Derby (G3) March 7, his season opener, a race won by The Puma with Further Ado second. The 1 1/8-mile Blue Grass was his second start of the year and fifth overall.

“He ran good in the Blue Grass,” Gargan said. “He kind of got stuck down on the rail. I think it kept him from running even better. I think he’d have been second easy if he’d had a better trip. He’s come out of that race better than he went into it. He used to swap leads, used to crossfire a lot in behind. He’s gotten stronger and stopped doing that lately, and that’s a big encouragement to move forward. He’s just getting more mature. We’ve been really patient with him, let him get there. And I think we’ve done everything we can to give him his best chance in the Preakness.”

A $600,000 Keeneland September 2024 yearling purchase, Talkin worked last Friday tooling a half-mile in 49 seconds. Gargan said his final work will be this Saturday, with Talkin vanning to Maryland Tuesday.

While Talkin could have made the Kentucky Derby (G1) field, Gargan said his target all along has been the 1 3/16-mile Middle Jewel of the Triple Crown.

“I never really planned on running in the Derby all year,” he said. “We had enough points to get in, but we stuck with our game plan. We know we have a horse that’s coming around. I want to go to the Derby more than anybody, but I want to win the Derby. I thought the best move for him was to give him the time to let him fill out a little more and shoot for the Preakness…. If I move forward five or six Beyers [speed figures] and move forward one or two points on the sheets, I could be in the winner’s circle. And I know I’m going to move forward.”

Asked how he’d look wearing Black-Eyed Susans, which adorn the blanket draped over the Preakness winner, Gargan said, “Well, my father won the Black-Eyed Susan. [He] won the Oaks and the Black-Eyed Susan with different horses, so it wouldn’t be the first Gargan to have the Black-Eyed Susans around him.”

As a jockey Gargan’s late father, also named Danny, won the 1973 Kentucky Oaks, then a Grade 2, on C.V. Whitney’s Bag of Tunes and Pimlico’s then Grade 3 Black-Eyed Susan aboard Fish Wife two weeks later.

Russell on Preakness Contender Taj Mahal: ‘He’s That Guy’

Undefeated multiple stakes winner Taj Mahal enjoys his role as the rising star in a deep stable of talented horses trained by Brittany Russell based at Laurel Park, where the 151st Preakness Stakes (G1) will be held May 16.

Taj Mahal earned an automatic entry to the Middle Jewel of the Triple Crown for his dominant 8 ¼-length victory in the 1 1/8-mile Federico Tesio April 18, which improved the bay colt to 3-0 lifetime. All his races, including a determined front-running neck triumph in the one-mile Miracle Wood Feb. 21, have come at Laurel.

“After he ran in the Tesio, he seemed to know. He had that air [about him]. We all came back to the barn and he was just posing,” Russell said. “He’s funny in the morning. [Regular exercise rider] Alex [Beitia] spoils him a little bit, as all the good horses seem to get. He takes his time walking to the track, stops, looks around, loves for everyone to have a look at him. He’s that guy.”

The plan is to give Taj Mahal a second work since the Tesio on Saturday at Laurel, weather permitting. Russell moved last weekend’s work from May 3 to May 2 to give her some wiggle room.

“He came out of the last work good,” Russell said. “I do plan on working Saturday. If I had to push it back to Sunday, it wouldn’t be the biggest deal.”

Taj Mahal had a regular jog and gallop day Wednesday with Beitia, who was up for a bullet five-furlong breeze in 1:00.40 last Saturday, fastest of 12 horses including fellow Preakness contender The Hell We Did.

“We’ll have a couple mile and a halfs at the end of the week into his work. That was kind of my plan,” Russell said. “He does a lot in his gallops and that was a pretty good work the other day, not that it took anything out of him.”

SF Racing, Starlight Racing, Madaket Stables, Stonestreet Stables, Bashor Racing, Determined Stables, Goldconda Stable, Waves Edge Capital and Catherine Donovan’s Taj Mahal shares identical ownership to another Preakness contender, Cherokee Nation, a $1.15 million yearling trained by Hall of Famer Bob Baffert.

Taj Mahal began his career on the West Coast with Baffert but was later moved to Russell – a move the connections have made with several other horses in recent years – and won his Feb. 6 unveiling just 15 days before the Miracle Wood. The ease with which Taj Mahal put in and exited his breezes got Team Russell excited.

“That’s kind of what caught our attention from the beginning,” she said. “Then I started putting him up beside some good horses and I’m like, ‘Hmm, is that other horse just not doing good or is this horse stepping up?’ He’s just always kind of handled everything we’ve thrown at him.”

After breezing solo last weekend, Taj Mahal is scheduled to have a workmate this weekend. His sire, 2015 juvenile champion Nyquist, was third in the 2016 Preakness after winning the Florida Derby (G1) and Kentucky Derby (G1).

“I plan to work him in company, but I’m still sorting out who I’m going to send with him,” Russell said. “It’s tricky because I probably only have a select few where it would be beneficial for both horses.”

Pretty Boy Miah to Work Saturday with Preakness in Mind

Team Penney Racing, Echo Racing, Flower City Racing, Anthony Bruno and Christopher Meyer’s Pretty Boy Miah is scheduled to breeze Saturday in Saratoga for what the connections hope is his next start in the 151st Preakness Stakes (G1) May 16 at Laurel Park.

“He’s going to work here on Saturday and then we’ll kind of make our decision on what our plans are after that,” trainer Jeremiah Englehart said Wednesday. “[We’re] trying to have fun and at the same time let him develop how we want to see him develop. He’s doing things now that I kind of felt like he was going to do since he came in.”

Pretty Boy Miah, a Kentucky-bred son of 2021 Ack Ack (G3) runner-up Beau Liam, will need some help to get into the Preakness, which is limited to 14 starters and two also-eligibles. As many as 17 horses are under consideration for the Middle Jewel of the Triple Crown including Kentucky Derby (G1) winner Golden Tempo.

The first seven Preakness starters are determined by purse earnings in graded-stakes. The next four are sorted by earnings in non-restricted stakes with the remainder by highest lifetime earnings in all races. Pretty Boy Miah has banked $95,800 in four starts, none of them in stakes.

“We feel like if he is able to draw into the race, that’s still our goal right now,” Englehart said. “That’s why you get into this. You want to take chances on big days and great races. It’s a great spot, so hopefully we get a chance to run in it and have some fun.”

Pretty Boy Miah has raced exclusively at Aqueduct, finishing second in his Jan. 1 unveiling and fourth in a Feb. 11 maiden special weight before Englehart added blinkers to his regular equipment. The result has been back-to-back victories by 10 ¼ combined lengths.

“We’ve always thought that he was going to be a nice horse,” Englehart said. “We thought blinkers would probably be in his future when we started running him early on. I wanted to give him the opportunity to run without them. After that second start when he got off a little slow and kind of was actually the only horse that whole day that looked like he might have closed at all, I thought it would be the right time to introduce him to blinkers in the afternoon.”

Pretty Boy Miah has progressed from six to 6 ½ furlongs to one mile in his most recent start April 25, and seen his speed figures improve with each start. His best races have come when he has run on or near the lead. The most recent gate-to-wire winner of the 1 3/16-mile Preakness was Seize the Grey in 2024.

“He’s just run two really good races and it seems like he’s going to be a nice 3-year-old,” Englehart said. “We’re slowly graduating him. We were planning to run him on Derby Day in an allowance out there, but he was training so well and they had the race at Aqueduct. I thought, ‘This might be a really good chance to win another race,’ and obviously it was.”

Record 18 Horses Contested 1928 Preakness, Won by Victorian

Though the field is now limited to a maximum of 14 runners, it wasn’t always that way for the Preakness Stakes. First run in 1873, making it the second-oldest Triple Crown race behind the Belmont Stakes (G1), the Preakness has exceeded that restriction twice in its storied history.

A record 18 horses went to post at Pimlico Race Course for the 53rd running on May 11, 1928 when Harry Payne Whitney’s homebred Victorian, sent off at 9-1, led nearly gate to wire and edged 21-1 longshot Toro by a nose in 1:58 2/5 for 1 3/16 miles. It was the last of six Preakness wins for Whitney, second straight and third in the 1920s.

On May 12, 1924, Nellie Morse became the fourth filly to win the Preakness and the second since its return to Maryland from New York in 1909 by topping a field of 15 – all males – over a heavy and sloppy track in 1:57 1/5 for 1 1/8 miles. Making the effort more remarkable was that it came just three days after she won the Pimlico Oaks, now contested as the Black-Eyed Susan.

The Preakness has had as many as 14 starters six other times: 1894, 1917, 1921, 1970, 1992, 2005 and 2011, the latter by Shackleford over such horses as Kentucky Derby (G1) winner Animal Kingdom, Florida Derby (G1) winner Dialed In and Mucho Macho Man, who went on to win the 2013 Breeders’ Cup Classic (G1).

As many as 16 horses remain under consideration for the 151st Preakness Stakes May 16 at Laurel Park: Kentucky Derby winner Golden Tempo, Cherokee Nation, Chip Honcho, Corona de Oro, Crude Velocity, Crupper, Express Kid, Great White, Iron Honor, Napoleon Solo, Pretty Boy Miah, Silent Tactic, Taj Mahal, Talkin, Talk to Me Jimmy and The Hell We Did.