The Day at the Races: Runhappy works at Keeneland in preparation for Breeders’ Cup

Wednesday’s figures: On-track attendance, 11,130; on-track betting, $729,199.80; total betting including simulcast, $5,794,205.80.

This day last year: On-track attendance, 9,685; on-track betting, $753,665; total betting including simulcast, $4,653,344.

Coming up: Live racing returns with a nine-race card Thursday.

Final furlong

▪ James McIngvale’s Runhappy, winner of last year’s Breeders’ Cup Sprint and the Eclipse Award winner as champion sprinter of 2015, worked a mile in 1:38.80 under jockey Gary Stevens over a fast track early Wednesday. Runhappy stood at the gap entering the track before backtracking to the three-quarter pole. The son of Super Saver worked from the half-mile pole to the half-mile pole and produced fractions of :23, :46.60, :58.80, 1:11.80, 1:25 and 1:38.80.

“I wanted to get him around two turns,” trainer Laura Wohlers said of Runhappy, who finished fourth in the Oct. 1 Grade III Ack Ack, a 1-turn mile race at Churchill Downs, in his first start in more than nine months. “Gary said he was as smooth as silk. He gave him a little breather around the second turn and he finished strong. I wanted Gary to get on him since he had not been on him since December (in the Grade I Malibu at Santa Anita).”

Wohlers plans to work Runhappy one more time either at Keeneland or The Thoroughbred Center before a scheduled ship to California on Oct. 23 for a start in the $1 million Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile to be run Nov. 4 at Santa Anita.

▪ Grade I winner Catch a Glimpse and graded stakes winner Time and Motion will meet for the fourth time as part of a top-notch field of nine 3-year-old fillies in Saturday’s Grade I, $500,000 Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup, which drew entries Wednesday. Catch a Glimpse, the 2015 Canadian Horse of the Year, got the better of Time and Motion in their first two meetings, once in the 2015 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf and again in the Belmont Oaks Invitational in which they ran 1-2. In the most recent start for both, Time and Motion prevailed by a neck in the Grade II Lake Placid at Saratoga.

This story was originally published October 12, 2016 at 6:28 PM with the headline "The Day at the Races: Runhappy works at Keeneland in preparation for Breeders’ Cup."