As the province’s top three-year-old pacing fillies head back to Woodbine Racetrack this Friday for the last $130,000 Gold final of their career, driver Luc Ouellette is crossing his fingers that Shacked Up can maintain her late season
momentum.
"She is really in her element right now, she’s really, really good," said the resident of Campbellville, Ont. "Knock on wood no sickness happens. If she’s healthy Friday night I really like her chances."
Ouellette’s concern is well founded. His mount in Wednesday’s two-year-old pacing filly Gold final at Windsor Raceway was scratched out of the event due to sickness, and Shacked Up’s stablemate Yellow Diamond will miss Friday’s contest.
Yellow Diamond caught Shacked Up in the last 100 yards of the elimination round, and was slated to defend her Gold final title from Post 7. Instead, first also eligible Fashion Week will enter the fray, and Ouellette hopes Shacked Up will have an opportunity to earn her second sophomore Gold final title from Post 1 in the eighth race.
"She is one overachiever, that little girl," Ouellette said.
"There was a horse about 15 years ago named Riyadh, and she is the same type of horse as Riyadh," added the veteran reinsman, who piloted $2.7 million winner Riyadh to seven wins as an aged horse in the mid 1990s. "She’s very, very little, you wouldn’t even call her medium, she’s small. Next to Yellow Diamond she looks really tiny. Her ears are always up and her mind is always on business. She reminds me a lot of Riyadh that way. She’s the type of horse you can really count on."
Ouellette noted that the filly, bred and owned by Bulletproof Enterprises of Boca Raton, Florida, is extremely versatile and has posted victories off a variety of trips. Through 14 starts, the daughter of Western Terror has accumulated six wins, four seconds and three thirds for earnings of $577,695. Shacked Up’s tally ranks below her stablemates, and fellow Gold final winners, Not Enough and Yellow Diamond, but Ouellette thinks she may just be the best of Brainard’s very talented three-year-old pacing filly clan.
"She was raced very conservatively at the beginning, and the more conservatively we raced her, the better she got," Ouellette said. "As the year went on, Tracy would tell me each week she trains better than the week before.
"They have four great mares, and she might be the best of all of them," the horseman added.
With a total of 206 points accumulated in her Gold Series efforts this summer, Shacked Up currently sits atop the division standings, 24 points ahead of Yellow Diamond. Following Friday’s Gold final, the dainty filly will wrap up her Ontario Sires Stakes career in the $300,000 Super Final on November 14 at Woodbine Racetrack, and her owner, trainer and driver would love to see her head into the season finale off a victory.
Shacked Up and her peers, including stablemates Kabbalah Karen B (Post 2), Coming Late (Post 5), and Cheap Motel (Post 8), will battle in Race 8 on Woodbine Racetrack’s Friday evening program, which gets under way at 7:30 p.m.
To view Woodbine's Friday evening harness racing entries, click here.
(OSS)