Southwind Ozzi Set To Return

When a resume boasts wins in Little Brown Jug and the Adios, the call of the breeding shed often ends a racing career at the end of a three-year-old season. But the decision to bring Southwind Ozzi back to the track at four adds more star power to the ever-competitive older pacing division.

Most of the attention on the glamour boy division coming into 2019 was focused on horses the likes of O'Brien Award winner Stag Party and Dan Patch Award winner Captain Crunch. Southwind Ozzi emerged from relative obscurity to capture some of the division's biggest races and defeat nearly every top horse in the division. A convincing winner in both the Adios and the Little Brown Jug, Southwind Ozzi (Somebeachsomewhere - Southwind Solara) compiled a 9-3-0 record from 15 seasonal starts for trainer Bill MacKenzie and owners New Jersey-based owners Vincent Ali Jr. and Alma Iafelice. He also won three PaSS legs and the $253,000 PaSS Final.

Near the end of the year when Southwind Ozzi had no major stakes events left on his calendar, his connections ponied up hefty supplemental fee to race in the Tattersalls at The Red Mile and the Breeders Crown at Woodbine Mohawk Park. The colt mustered runner-up finishes in the Tattersalls and the Breeders Crown elimination, a fifth-place finish in the Breeders Crown final and an off-the-board effort in the Hap Hansen Progress Pace.

"He was as good as anybody towards the end; we lost a little when he got that infection in his neck," MacKenzie told Trot Insider. "Down in Lexington we scoped him after the race and he was pretty sick, and the vet treated him but he had a reaction to the medicine they gave him going into the Breeders Crown, so he wasn't at his best then. We still had the race down at Dover and we tried to get him through it...We kind of think that had something to do with the end of his year. He was OK to race but he wasn't at his best."

After the Progress, Southwind Ozzi was returned to MacKenzie's farm for a few months of turnout before coming back into the barn to start training.

"We decided at the end of the year we were going to race him as a four-year-old. He's a good-feeling horse, trains good, his personality is the same as when he was three. He likes his routine and he's pretty easy on himself.

"It's a big jump from three to four, that's why you try to catch some of these four-year-old races like the Graduate so you can stay away from these five and six-year-olds. Shoot, nowadays there are some good 10-year-olds out there, Foiled Again was pretty good for a long time. This is a big step for these three-coming-fours. We'll see what it brings us."

There's one key difference to Southwind Ozzi from how he's coming into the harness racing season compared to a year ago, and it has nothing to do with the colt himself.

"We staked him to everything," stated MacKenzie. "We supplemented a lot last year and we decided that we don't want to supplement. We were good enough last year. If we make the next step we should be good enough this year."

MacKenzie admitted that if North American harness racing hadn't shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Southwind Ozzi most likely would have qualified by now.

"We've got him kind of ready, backed off and have him in a holding pattern. I feel like I'd probably need like a two-week window to have him race ready....We're continuing to work with him, we just backed off a little bit and we could be up and going in two weeks if we had a date.

"We had to adjust with a bunch. We had to stop with Ozzi. Obviously he should be qualified by now but we're not qualifying him, we had some other horses that were ready to race, we have a few racing, we have a couple of two-year-olds that aren't affected in any way...just a little bit of a change. They're getting a little extra outside time."

Like many horsemen, MacKenzie is eager to see racing return but is fully cognizant of the severity of the situation at hand. He and his family are currently at the Cranbury, N.J. farm where the stable is located and they're able to easily maintain physical distancing guidelines.

"As you know right now this is a serious thing, they don't shut the country down if it's not serious. We race some horses at Yonkers Raceway, I grew up with the Fuscos...I would always see John Brennan up there...it's pretty serious. It sucks for a lot of people, pretty much everyone, but you've got your health and your family's got their health. We can get through this and we're all in the same boat."