More spectacular weather greeted a full house of fans at Batavia Downs on Friday night (July 31) and the faithful were treated to extraordinary performances by both man and beast.
The man was 20-year-old Drew Monti, who put on a driving clinic scoring five victories on the card. He won with Feets Of Magic ($4.00), Im The Cash Man ($15.80), Ooga Booga ($7.80), Gregs Girl ($10.40) and Big Baller ($5.70).
But winning wasn’t the whole story.
Monti had a total of eight drives and never missed the board. Besides the already mentioned victories, he had two seconds and a third, which gave him an amazing UDR of .805 for the program.
The beast was definitely Lutetium (Kevin Cummings), who regained old form and put forth a monstrous effort in winning the Friday night feature, $10,000 Open Trot.
Leaving with the car when the race began, Lutetium was on top before track announcer Joe Zambito could articulate it. He then took his followers through fractions of :28.2, :57 and 1:26.2 before trotting away from the group by three-lengths in 1:56 flat. That time was one-fifth off the track record for aged trotting geldings, which Lutetium co-holds with Second Hand News. The effort was so dominant that no other horse in the race got close enough to make a bid.
The win was the fifth in 19 starts this year for Lutetium and it raised his annual income to $38,581 for owner Colleen Girdlestone. Mark Laidlaw trains the altered son of Credit Winner, who paid $7.40.
Other notable performances included Downs defending driving champion Kevin Cummings scoring a hat trick and trainer Darrin Monti, who also registered three winners on the card.
(Batavia Downs)