If Jeremeyes Jewel brings as much fight to her Ontario Sires Stakes debut at Mohawk Racetrack on Thursday as she does to her daily training regimen, the two-year-old pacing filly should be a shoo-in for a share of the $40,000 Gold elimination purse.
“She’s cranky. To this day you cannot put a bridle on her all in one piece. It’s all piece-by-piece. It’s was very trying from the time she got broke,” explains trainer Lori Jennex. “When she decides she wants to do it, she’ll do it, and if she doesn’t want to do it, she won’t do it.”
Guelph residents Jennex, her mother Earla Geisel and step-father Joseph Kelly bred and own Jeremeyes Jewel, the fourth foal and first Jeremes Jet offspring from the mare Allamerican Eyeful. Jennex says the mare also had a cantankerous nature, but notes that Jeremeyes Jewel is the first of her foals to share that trait.
Born at the family’s farm in Guelph, the filly was raised at Joanne Colville’s High Stakes farm in Moffat and Jennex says their first inkling of trouble ahead came the day they picked up the then yearling filly to bring her home.
“The day we picked her up, it was, I think it took us almost 40 minutes to put her on the trailer,” recalls the horse woman. “And Joanne said, ‘If you fight with her she fights back just as hard.’”
Breaking Jeremeyes Jewel was such a trial, if you had asked Jennex six months ago whether she had an Ontario Sires Stakes prospect in her barn the response would have been a resounding ‘No’.
“We only paid her up to the Sires Stakes because in January, February, we didn’t even know if she was even going to race, because we were having that much trouble with the bridle,” the trainer explains, adding that everyone in the barn had a hand, literally, in bridling the filly during those early struggles.
Fortunately the filly gradually progressed to the point where she will tolerate the piece-by-piece bridling approach and Jennex was able to send her out in a two-year-old qualifier at Mohawk on June 15. With James MacDonald in the race bike Jeremeyes Jewel sat second through fractions of :28.3, 1:00 and 1:30, then tipped out and rocketed home to a 1:57.3 victory.
“When we took her the first time, I think we got to the three-quarters in 1:30, and I said to my step-father, ‘We’re not even going to get qualified here because we have to go two minutes’, and all of a sudden you see James pull her out and away she went,” Jennex recalls. “And then the teletimer stopped at 1:57.3 and we were shocked because it said last quarter in :27.1, so we were like holy crap, because we’ve never had a horse, a two-year-old, do that.”
Jeremeyes Jewel and MacDonald returned to Mohawk for a second qualifier on June 23 and in spite of some equipment issues the pair laid down a 1:59.3 runner-up effort.
“Last week she blew a shoe coming down at the three-quarter pole. James said a shoe came off and hit him right in the cross bar, and then next thing he’s going along, he said, then the Murphy blind came off,” says Jennex. “I mean most two-year-olds would have kind of lost their minds blowing the shoe and then with the Murphy — because she’s kind of crazy with her head — but he said nope she just kept going.”
Jennex hopes that kind of tenacity leads Jeremeyes Jewel to success in the Ontario Sires Stakes program, but the lifelong horseperson is realistic about the filly’s prospects in her debut. Facing off against eight other hopefuls from Post 2 in the first Gold Elimination, MacDonald and Jeremeyes Jet will need a top three finish to guarantee a spot in next week’s $130,000 Gold Final.
“We talked to James and James says, ‘I’m not busy Thursday night so we could go Gold’. So I said, ‘Well okay, we can try it’, and I mean if it doesn’t work out we can always go back down to Grassroots,” she explains pragmatically.
Kicking off their Ontario Sires Stakes careers in Races 2, 4 and 8, the two-year-old pacing fillies will be aiming for top three finishes as only two fourth-place competitors, selected by random draw, will advance to the July 6 Gold Final.
Post time for Mohawk Racetrack’s Thursday evening program is 7:10 p.m.
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To view entries for Thursday's card of harness racing, click the following link: Thursday Entries – Mohawk Racetrack.