Belmont Stakes 2021: Essential Quality, Hot Rod Charlie look ready to go again, trainers say
ELMONT, N.Y. - The trainers of Essential Quality and Hot Rod Charlie were pleasantly surprised by how well their 3-year-olds looked Sunday morning after their knockdown, drag-out stretch battle in Saturday’s $1.5 million Belmont Stakes won by Essential Quality.
Essential Quality trainer Brad Cox said the way his horse was behaving Sunday morning, “he looks like he didn’t even run.
“He’s not drawn up, he’s carrying great flesh, looks bright,” Cox added. “He’s just acting like himself, biting the shank, typical things colts do when they’re happy and fresh. He ran a mile and a half, a demanding race, and he looks like he could do it again next week.”
Essential Quality won’t have to do it again next week. He will get ample time to recover from the Belmont, a race in which, under Luis Saez, he made a four-wide move down the backstretch, engaged the wickedly fast pacesetting Hot Rod Charlie leaving the three-eighths pole and outgamed that rival to the wire.
Essential Quality beat Hot Rod Charlie by 1 1/4 lengths, ran 1 1/2 miles in 2:27.11, and earned a 109 Beyer Speed Figure. It’s the fifth-fastest Belmont in the last 30 years, fastest since American Pharoah won it in 2:26.65 clinching the Triple Crown in 2015.
Cox said Essential Quality would travel back to Churchill Downs by van on Monday morning. With Churchill closing down its backstretch as of July 4 while it does renovations to its turf course, Essential Quality will be part of a large contingent of horses Cox will keep in Saratoga this summer.
Cox’s next major objective with Essential Quality is the Grade 1, $1.25 million Travers Stakes at Saratoga on Aug. 28. Cox must decide whether to train him up to that race or run him once beforehand, presumably in a race such as the Grade 2, $600,000 Jim Dandy at Saratoga on July 31.
Waiting 12 weeks to run in the 1 1/4-mile Travers “is a pretty big ask,” Cox said.
Birdstone, in 2004, was able to successfully win the Travers after winning the Belmont and not racing in between. Tapwrit, the last horse to try it, finished fourth in the 2017 Travers.
The victory was the sixth from seven starts for Essential Quality, a son of Tapit owned by Godolphin Racing. Essential Quality, last year’s 2-year-old champion, was coming off a fourth-place finish, beaten one length, in the Kentucky Derby.
Trainer Doug O’Neill said he was “floored by the amount of energy” Hot Rod Charlie displayed Sunday morning when he took him out of the stall and jogged him down the shed row in Belmont’s Barn 36. In the Belmont, Hot Rod Charlie set impossible early fractions of 22.78 seconds for the quarter and 46.79 for the half-mile and still hung around for the finish, giving way only in the last sixteenth of a mile. He finished 11 1/4 lengths clear of third-place finisher Rombauer.
“When they run like that, especially at that distance, you assume you’re going to see a horse that barely touches his dinner and his head is just dragging on the shed row dirt in the morning.” O’Neill said. “I saw just the opposite. He cleaned up his feed tub, his legs look great.”
O’Neill said Hot Rod Charlie was to return to Southern California on Tuesday. He will watch how the horse is doing before making a decision on where to run next.
O’Neill said the $1 million Haskell on July 17 at Monmouth Park “is intriguing. It’s six weeks away, so that’s a possibility,” he said.
Rombauer, third in the Belmont after winning the Preakness three weeks earlier, is also headed back to Southern California on Tuesday. Trainer Michael McCarthy said his horse was “amped up” walking through the tunnel onto the track and again during pre-race warmup.
“All things considered, I was very pleased with how he performed yesterday,” McCarthy said. “It would have been nice to have had five weeks instead of three weeks.”
McCarthy said “all the big summer 3-year-old dirt races will be considered” for Rombauer.
Given how well Rombauer ran off a 90-day layoff when he won the El Camino Real Derby in February, McCarthy said “it wouldn’t be out of the question” to train Rombauer up to the Travers.
Trainer Todd Pletcher's trio of Known Agenda, Bourbonic, and Overtook finished fourth, fifth, and seventh, respectively, in the Belmont.
Known Agenda was beaten three-quarters of a length for third by Rombauer. At the three-eighths pole, Pletcher thought “he was still in the mix and just kind of finished evenly from there,” he said.
Pletcher said he would like to point Known Agenda to the Travers.
“There’s still improvement left there, so we’ll see how he comes out of it and talk to everybody and see what everyone’s thoughts are,” Pletcher said. “I think the Travers would be the goal and the question is what do we do between now and then.”
