Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Mindframe poised to put on a show after Belmont miss
OCEANPORT, N.J. – Jockey Irad Ortiz Jr. administered a left-handed pop of the riding crop to the 3-year-old colt Mindframe at about the eighth pole in a March 30 maiden sprint at Gulfstream Park. Not that Mindframe needed encouragement. Making his career debut, Mindframe looped rivals on the turn and already had put them all to bed when Ortiz, dishing out as many lessons as he could in the colt’s first start, gave his mount a taste of what a real race might feel like. So cropped, Mindframe didn’t move an inch off his line, running straight as a string to the finish, Ortiz merely flagging him with the stick.
The second left-hander Mindframe felt from Ortiz came between the three-sixteenths and eighth poles in the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga. Same response – namely, nothing. So dominant had Mindframe been in his second start, a Churchill route allowance, that Ortiz could have ridden backward through the homestretch and won. The colt never felt the crop. But in the Belmont, Mindframe found himself for the first time in true battle, and as he appeared to push past Dornoch, the lone horse standing between him and victory, Ortiz dealt out that left-hander and Mindframe, relentless, looked like a certain winner.
Ortiz went back for another left-handed smack, a fateful one. Mindframe shied from the stick, veering toward the stands and winding up a good five or six paths from where he’d started by the time Ortiz got him corrected and back on track. Too late. Dornoch hugged the fence as Mindframe wandered, taking back the lead, winning by a half-length.
The people against Mindframe in the Belmont asserted that the colt’s experience would prove his undoing. But watching Mindframe go about his business, racing and working, through late winter and early spring, one saw a horse unusually comfortable in his own skin, relaxed, attentive, unfazed.
“Not only was he physically gifted, he just had such a great mind. You could do anything with him.”
So said R. Larry Johnson, who bred Mindframe and raised him at his Legacy Farm in Bluemont, Va. – and he was talking about this horse as a yearling.
And yet the skeptics were right. Inexperience had cost Mindframe a Belmont Stakes.
“It was what we and everyone else knew going in,” trainer Todd Pletcher said. “We had a horse talented enough to win the Belmont. The question was: Did we have a horse that was too inexperienced?”
Maybe Dornoch’s the better horse, would have come back to win regardless of Mindframe’s comportment. We’ll find out Saturday at Monmouth Park. Mindframe, presumably properly seasoned now, seeks his first stakes win in the Grade 1, $1 million Haskell Stakes. Dornoch seeks to dispel the notion that his two best wins, in the Remsen last fall over Sierra Leone and in the Belmont, came with help from an inside speed bias as well as a chief rival’s costly mistake.
Pletcher also entered Florida Derby winner Fierceness in the 1 1/8-mile Haskell, but he runs only if something goes amiss with Mindframe before race day. Tuscan Sky, a third Pletcher charge, won the Long Branch at Monmouth and will run in the Haskell, which also drew Grade 1 winner Timberlake, trying to restart a campaign stalled with a disappointing Arkansas Derby defeat. Also entered is Sea Streak, a New Jersey-bred with pluck and talent but a mountain range removed from the likes of Mindframe.
In his two races, starts No. 1 and 3, where a pedestrian pace didn’t suppress Mindframe’s final time, the colt has put up Beyer Speed Figures of 103 and 101, the latter in a race where he failed to run straight. Those
numbers, the ease with which Mindframe won his first two, his tough Belmont loss, and the rugged, powerful physical presence of this colt suggest that by year’s end he might not only be the best 3-year-old dirt route horse in North America, but the best dirt-route horse, period.
“I think he’s a special talent; there’s no question about it,” Pletcher said. “I felt like that going into his debut and still feel that way. Everything he’s done in his racing career has supported that. He’s a May 13 foal and he’s still physically strengthening. There’s still room for improvement, and it takes a special horse to do what he’s done.”
Ducking from the crop marked Mindframe’s second instance of bad timing. The colt took to serious training during summer of his 2-year-old season and posted one official workout last August at Saratoga before suffering what Pletcher termed “a little setback, a non-surgical issue.” Mindframe went to rehab in Ocala, Fla., and joined Pletcher’s string at Palm Beach Downs late in 2023, breezing for the second time on Jan. 29. Mindframe didn’t miss a beat but still had no chance to make the Kentucky Derby.
“People think it’s a long time to May. You can get behind schedule in a hurry,” Pletcher said.
Mindframe is by Constitution and out of the Street Sense mare Walk of Stars, foaled in Maryland before moving to his breeder’s Virginia farm. Sent to the Keeneland September sale in 2022, Mindframe fetched $600,000, purchased by Mike Repole’s Repole Stables and Vincent Viola’s St. Elias Farm.
“He was quite a buzz horse from the start,” said Johnson, Mindframe’s breeder. Johnson long has been a fixture on the mid-Atlantic circuit, mainly breeding his own horses to race. Legacy has a synthetic training track. They also have undertaken sales prep work since Johnson began sending some of his stock to auction. Could have gone either way, sell or race, with Mindframe, as Johnson watched the colt mature in the fields near his residence. “He developed into such a nice yearling as he grew up. He was a really nice horse, and Constitution was really starting to catch on. I figured if I get good money for him, I’m happy to sell; if I don’t, I’m happy to race him.”
Walk of Stars has a Jack Christopher foal by her side and was bred back this year to Constitution. Johnson, of course, watched the Belmont as intently as anyone, believing at the head of the homestretch he’d bred the winner of a Triple Crown race.
“I thought he wins off. ‘Crushed’ is a good word for how it felt. At least it validated what people thought of him.”
Ortiz made Mindframe’s acquaintance this past winter breezing him at Palm Beach Downs.
“I worked him one time from the gate. He worked amazing.
Todd let me work him and told me to ask him to work a little more, to gallop out three-quarters. No problem. I dropped my hands, and he went out about one mile. I was like, whoa, he’s a nice one,” Ortiz said.
Most open-lengths debut winners at Gulfstream show speed, run rivals off their feet. Mindframe, going seven furlongs first out, sat chilly off the pace, instantly accelerated when Ortiz asked him, and absolutely jogged home. He took the race well, physically and mentally. At Churchill, in his route debut, Ortiz asked for speed from an outside post position, Mindframe crossing and clearing before the first turn, readily down-shifting to low gear, controlling a soft pace, sprinting home. Not many fast young horses are so willing to run slow.
Did Mindframe win those races too easily for his own good? Did he lack that final coat of fitness that might have enabled him to overcome his Belmont mistake?
“I think maybe had he been challenged a little more in his last two starts, he might have,” Pletcher said. “Knock on wood, he’s been extremely healthy since we got him back. This is a very important race for him, being a Grade 1. With his physical attributes, he’s a big-time stallion prospect.”
The breeder, a racing fan, will be watching again. Every good thing Mindframe does on track redounds to Johnson’s nascent commercial breeding operation. A Haskell could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at future auctions.
“Quite honestly, you can’t look back, and I got paid a fair price. I own the mother, I have her whole family,” Johnson said. “But there is a bit of regret. He’s the kind of horse, if you breed to race you spend a lifetime trying to get.”
And Mindframe’s best might be yet to come.