Stayers' Watch: Tokyo City Cup Handicap · 31.03.09

This is the second year that Santa Anita’s Tokyo City Cup Handicap (Gr. III) has been run as a stayers’ race — the first of a series of dirt/synth distance races leading up to the Breeders’ Cup Marathon. Of the horses who raced in last year’s edition, Big Booster and Zappa were back again to try to improve on their previous third and fourth-place finishes.

In the end, however, it was Stream Cat — whose last win was in July and who had never won a stayers’ race at all — who finished on top in the 1 1/2-mile Tokyo City Cup. Rating well off a fast early pace set by Zappa and Kizzy’s Chaos, the 6-year-old gelding made his move at the top of the stretch, caught Kizzy’s Chaos around the eighth-pole, and held off a late-closing Big Booster to win by a neck. Medjool was an additional two lengths back in third; Zappa eventually faded to last. Stream Cat’s time on a fast synthetic track was a relatively pedestrian 2:31.92.

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