Saint Stephen makes it up to win Native Diver

Jockey Garrett Gomez bided his time, then finished fast -- and first -- time and again.

Gomez won four races Sunday at Hollywood Park, including the $100,000 Native Diver Handicap, coming from 14 1/2 lengths back aboard Saint Stephen to run down a pair of front-runners and win by half a length.

Flamethrowintexan and the favorite, Ball Four, figured to go to the front in the 1 1/8 -mile race and they did, opening a double-digit lead on the field.

“They were going really, really fast, and you could see they were in their own sparring match,” Gomez said. “They were kind of zigzagging in front and playing head games with each other. So I wasn’t necessarily too worried about them.

“I took a peek about the five-sixteenth poll to see how much ground I had to make up on them. I still felt really confident.”

Gomez said his concerns were the horse just in front of him, Don Incauto, and one behind him, Southern Africa.

He made his move when he saw Jon Court start to make his aboard Southern Africa, then overtook the tiring leaders in the stretch.

“Garrett did a great job. He’s on fire right now,” said Arnaud Delacour, the assistant to Saint Stephen’s trainer, Christophe Clement, who brought the 6-year-old back from a layoff after an illness following a victory in his last race at Pimlico in April.

Gomez, the leading rider of the Hollywood meet and one of the leading riders in the country, swept the weekend stakes races after winning the Hollywood Turf Cup with Boboman on Saturday.

On Sunday, he won the fourth aboard Fete, the seventh on Plot Twist, the eighth on Lady Gamer, and the featured ninth with Saint Stephen, who paid $9.60 for the Grade III victory.

“You know it’s just luck,” he said. “The losing mounts I had today could have ended up all on one day too. It’s just one of those things -- I was lucky enough to have it all on one day.”

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Ouija Board, a two-time winner of the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf, was retired because of soreness in her left front leg before what was to be her final race in the Hong Kong Vase on Sunday.

The 5-year-old, a Breeders’ Cup winner in 2004 and 2006, already was scheduled to become a broodmare at the end of the year, and is expected to be bred to Kingmambo.

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Onieda County, pulled up while leading the third race Sunday on the backstretch of the Hollywood Park turf course, was euthanized because of a right front leg injury.

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robyn.norwood@latimes.com