Mystik Dan, the Kentucky Derby winner by a nose in the race’s closest finish in more than a half-century, is heading to the Preakness Stakes next weekend after all, keeping alive the chance of another Triple Crown winner in thoroughbred racing.
Kenny McPeek, the trainer for the horse, announced the decision Saturday after speaking with owners and weighing the pros and cons of racing again on a two-week turnaround that is considered short. He initially expressed concern about that time frame after Mystik Dan ran poorly under the same circumstances in November.
Still, he liked enough of what he saw in training to take a chance.
“All systems go,” McPeek said Saturday. “The horse is doing fantastic.”
The possibility of Mystik Dan, who finished just ahead of Sierra Leone and Forever Young in the 1 1/4-mile race at Louisville’s Churchill Downs last weekend thanks to a perfect, rail-skimming ride by jockey Brian Hernandez Jr., not going to the Preakness next Saturday raised questions about the status of the prestigious race.
Twice in the previous four years, the Kentucky Derby winner did not run — a product of various circumstances.
But the lure of going to Baltimore and Pimlico Race Course was too much to pass up for McPeek, who won the pandemic-delayed 2020 Preakness with filly Swiss Skydiver, who beat Kentucky Derby champion Authentic.
No one has won both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, which is 1 3/16 miles, since the most recent Triple Crown champion, Justify in 2018 for Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert. Mystik Dan doing so would set up a first: a Triple Crown on the line at New York’s Saratoga Race Course, the Upstate Region venue where the Belmont Stakes is being held for the next two years while the race’s longtime home on Long Island is being torn down and rebuilt as part of a massive, $455 million reconstruction project.
Mystik Dan may not be the Preakness favorite, though. That distinction likely belongs to Muth, one of two horses being brought by Baffert, who was again not allowed to enter horses in the Kentucky Derby because of a ban on him by Churchill Downs caused by Medina Spirit failing a drug test after finishing first in the race in 2021.
The only other horse from the Kentucky Derby expected to run in the Preakness is 17th-place finisher Just Steel, trained by 88-year-old Hall of Famer D. Wayne Lukas.