Although he started his career on the dirt, Air Support has
made an early name for himself running on the New York
turf, earning a trip to the Breeders’ Cup courtesy of a workmanlike win in the
Grade 3 Pilgrim at Belmont
Park on October 3.
A son of Smart Strike out of the unraced Danzig
mare Gaze, Air Support was bred by owner Stuart Janney, III, who said he
thought the match could just as easily produce a talented dirt horse as a turf
specialist.
“Smart Strike is an awfully good sire and he gets good grass
horses,” said Janney. “With Gaze’s breeding, I think she might well have good
grass horses, but also great runners on dirt.”
Gaze is out of Laughing Look, making her a half-sister to
Coronado’s Quest, a multiple-graded stakes winner on dirt whose win record
includes the 1998 Travers Stakes. She has produced two turf runners by
Dynaformer, Perusal and Imaging, both of whom are stakes-placed on the grass in
New York.
“I’ve always thought well of Gaze,” said Janney. “She had a
very difficult production history when she first started out as a broodmare.
With Dynaformer getting older, we were trying to find a top sire for a pretty
good mare in order to get a dirt horse or a grass horse.”
Air Support debuted in a 5 ½-furlong maiden special weight
race at Belmont
on July 15, finishing fifth and convincing his connections that he might prefer
turf.
“I wanted to see how he’d do on dirt,” said the colt’s Hall
of Fame trainer Shug McGaughey. “When he was a young 2-year-old, we always kind
of liked him. He’s got a good pedigree being by Smart Strike, and I probably
thought he’d like the grass all along because his half-brother [Perusal] liked
it.”
After an impressive work on the Saratoga turf on July 28,
McGaughey sent Air Support to make his second start in a 1 1/8-mile turf maiden
on August 13, which he won by a nose after a stalking trip.
“Shug called me after he worked on the turf and said ‘This
horse is really a different horse on grass than on turf,’” said Janney. “His
first win was very close, and I thought he ran a very courageous race.”
“He was still a little bit green when he broke his maiden,”
McGaughey added. “He chased a pretty hot pace, but he was able to win – when
the other horses came to him, he went on again.”
Off that victory, Air Support started next in the Grade 3
With Anticipation on closing weekend at Saratoga,
piloted by Rajiv Maragh to a fourth-place finish behind Soldat, who is also
Breeders’ Cup bound.
“I thought his race there was decent, the turf was like a
conveyor belt and Rajiv came back and said ‘Man, he really tried, we just
couldn’t catch up, they weren’t coming back,’” McGaughey said. “So I felt right
after that race that the turf at Belmont
would play to his liking a little bit better.”
Exactly one month later on October 3, Air Support turned the
tables on Soldat, drawing clear in the lane to win the Grade 3 Pilgrim over
yielding ground, which guaranteed him a starting berth in the one-mile
Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf on November 6. On Wednesday, he breezed four
furlongs over the main track at Belmont
Park in 48.42 and is scheduled to
depart for Louisville
today.
“Being a 2-year-old, I’d rather get him in there and let him
get settled because there will be so much activity,” McGaughey said. “[With an
older horse] you kind of know what you’ve got, with a 2-year-old, sometimes you
don’t know what you’ve got. When I took Storm Flag Flying to Chicago [for the
2002 Juvenile Fillies, a race she won en route to Champion 2-year-old filly
honors], we went in kind of on top of the race. I galloped her in the morning,
early, and then when she ran that afternoon, with all the signs and the stands
and everything, she was looking at everything.
“He’s still a little bit immature,” McGaughey continued. “I
think he’s done very well and I think that he deserves a chance to run in
there. I still think his future is in front of him.”
Janney – who bypassed the frequently used financial and
mining references when naming the son of Smart Strike reasoning that “a smart
strike might also be an air attack" – is thrilled to send a homebred to
the championship series.
“I love that he’s a homebred,” said Janney, who has
longstanding ties to the horse’s family. His parents campaigned the champion
filly Ruffian, sired by Reviewer, a son of Bold Ruler, as well as her older
sibling, Laughter, a daughter of Bold Ruler and the dam of Laughing Look. “It
adds a little extra dimension. I’ve got an awful lot in this family and it
would be terrific to see it prosper.”