A pair of 13-1 shots won their $20,000 third and final preliminary divisions of the Bobby Weiss Series for three-year-old trotting colts at Pocono Downs at Mohegan Pennsylvania on a cool Sunday night (April 23).
Braxten Boyd’s 13-1 winner wasn’t as surprising as it might be otherwise, as the 23-year-old rising star added $28.20 Wentworth Hanover to Sunday victories that returned $42.20, $28.40, $11.60 and $11.20 to win. Wentworth Hanover, an International Moni gelding trained by Clifton Green for the LCT Stable, got the best post draw of his five-race career and made the most of it, closing for a neck victory over G Load while breaking his maiden in 1:56.2. Favoured Moni Book, off wins in the first two legs, set the pace but had to settle for third, a half-length back.
Mark MacDonald used opposite tactics with 13-1 shot Snowman Hanover, and the Bar Hopping gelding drew away in the last quarter while lowering his mark to 1:55.4. Ray Schnittker trains the winner for Schnittker Bordogna, Arden Homestead Stable, Steven Arnold and Ted Gewertz. Next week’s $50,000 Weiss Championship for this division now looks more wide-open than it did entering the evening.
Top pacing events on the night card were a pair of $16,500 contests for the highest-priced claiming horses on the grounds. And the hottest claimer on the grounds, the Art Official gelding Park Official, rolled to his seventh straight victory in one division, charging up the inside as the pocket rocket for a 1:53 win for driver Anthony Napolitano (who drove four winners on the card), trainer Marta Piotrow and owner Debbie Avery, who’s won $44,750 with her astute $30,000 claim of March 18.
The other top claimer went to the Cams Card Shark gelding Urban Renewal, who continued one trend on the card as a 14-1 shot while bucking another as a coast-to-coast winner in 1:52.4 for driver George Napolitano Jr., trainer Mike Watson and Friendship Stables.
Monday’s 1 p.m. (EDT) program at Pocono is topped by the $20,000 Championship for Game Of Claims Pacing Series horses with a series base tag of $10,000 (no claiming from the finals); it also features the final prelim leg for the Weiss Series for three-year-old pacing fillies, with C Is For Cookie and Relentless Julie looking for their third straight against their Weiss contemporaries.
(PHHA / Pocono)