Champagneforashley’s Race Today Figures as Bump on Road to Derby

Until now, the DeWitt Clinton Stakes has been little more than a minor pari-mutuel distraction on the way to the subway for Aqueduct’s A-Train commuters. Today--and probably just this once--it’s a stop on the road to the Kentucky Derby.

As a rule, minor if inordinately lucrative stakes races restricted to New York-breds are of interest only to the participants and those alive in the Pick Six. But there never has been a New York-bred 3-year-old comparable to Champagneforashley, whose presence has made an otherwise banal feature today at Aqueduct into an event of significance, if not prestige, in the Derby chase.

Had he been born in any state other than New York, Champagneforashley might be in a bit of a jam three weeks before the Kentucky Derby. His training was interrupted briefly by a mild case of colic after a tougher than expected season’s debut at Tampa Bay Downs last month.

The New York-bred stakes program afforded trainer Howie Tesher an alternative unavailable to those preparing Triple Crown prospects bred in Kentucky, Florida and elsewhere. It gave him the luxury of allowing his undefeated colt the time necessary to recover without having to accelerate training in order to make last week’s Gotham Stakes and the Wood Memorial April 21, his major pre-Derby objective. All this and a soft spot with a $75,000-added purse, too.

Tesher said Champagneforashley is still short of the finished product. The colt was ready to go 7 furlongs when asked to race 1 1-16 miles in the Tampa Bay Derby, and he rose to the occasion while tested for class, according to rider Jacinto Vasquez. Tesher said that despite a series of strong works, Champagneforashley only now is coming to hand. The Clinton will put the colt on edge for the Wood, the trainer said, and the 9-furlong Wood will take him to the 10-furlong Derby in peak form. “The farther he goes, the easier it will be for him,” Tesher said. “I think he’ll be even better when he’s taken back off the pace.”

The DeWitt Clinton will be Champagneforashley’s last stop on the back road to Louisville. He has run only four widely spaced, low-profile races in eight months and won them by an aggregate 32 lengths. But after today’s exercise, the racy-looking colt whose stride is almost liquid will find himself in the mainstream while hounded by this question: Who has he beaten?

That interrogative will follow him into the Wood, his first Grade I start, and will be repeated ad nauseam in Kentucky.

Today’s task appears to confront the Track Barron colt with little more than structured exercise to complement a string of fast morning works in Florida. On paper, Tesher’s colt is vastly superior to the seven he faces here.