Let’s Discuss: Call This Race

Watch the race and weigh in: who interfered with whom, and how would you have made the call?

It’s only December, but the Road to the Kentucky Derby is heating up quickly with this year’s juveniles in the hunt for the qualification points necessary to earn their berth at Churchill Downs next May. If you need a refresher on how the Road to the Kentucky Derby works, check out our guide here.

The CashCall Futurity at Los Alamitos is one of the official “Prep Season” races for Derby hopefuls, and Saturday’s running saw five two-year-olds contending for the win. Juvenile races can always be just a bit of a mess, with young and relatively green horses still trying to find their way around the track and in company, and the CashCall is perhaps a perfect example.

Watch this five-horse-race and decide for yourself if there was enough interference in the stretch to merit a change in order, or if you think the race was fair and the order of finish should stand.

The way the stewards at Los Alamitos saw it, Solomini came in at the last sixteenth, knocking Instilled Regard off-strike. The win went instead to McKinzie, who finished technically second three-quarters of a length behind. Instilled Regard moved up to second and Solomini was relegated to third. Both Solomini and McKinzie are trained by Bob Baffert.

Do you agree with the call?