Preakness drawing a strong field at an unusually early juncture

The question that lingers over the Preakness Stakes every year is still to be answered.

Will the top performers in the Kentucky Derby make the two-week turnaround and come to Maryland?

We’ll start to get an idea in the days after the Run for the Roses is held Saturday at Churchill Downs.

In the meantime, the often-outshined middle jewel of the Triple Crown is already starting to build a competitive field, headlined by two horses that are skipping the Derby and pointing to Laurel Park, where the Preakness will be held this year as Pimlico Race Course gets rebuilt.

Two-time Preakness-winning trainer Chad Brown is opting to give one of his top colts, Iron Honor, additional rest after a disappointing seventh-place finish in the Grade 2 Wood Memorial Stakes at Aqueduct in April. (He’ll still have the 15-1 Emerging Market running under the twin spires.)

While Iron Honor, the son of Derby-winner Nyquist, earned a spot in the starting gate by virtue of his win in the Grade 3 Gotham, Brown is hoping a six-week break will help his colt after a particularly rough trip in the Wood Memorial.

“Once he got hit in the first turn of that race, the jockey, Manny Franco, told me then he sort of tried to pull and half run off down the backside. He was fighting with him, kind of wore him out,” Brown told reporters last week. “Not the prep you need to run in the Kentucky Derby, that’s for sure.”

Brown said he has continued working the colt with Preakness in mind and is contemplating additional changes, such as removing the colt’s blinkers. This path has worked before, he observed.

Cloud Computing came out of a third-place finish in the 2017 Wood Memorial to win Preakness, giving Brown his first win in the Triple Crown series. And he pulled it off again in 2022 with Early Voting, who finished second at Aqueduct.

“Both of them got beat in the Wood, and they had that six-week rest and I was able to get them there really ready for a top effort,“ he said. ”That’s what I’m going to try to do with this horse.”

Hall of Fame trainer Steven Asmussen is hoping a similar layoff will benefit Chip Honcho, the winner of the Gun Runner Stakes at Fair Grounds last December.

The son of Connect ran in three Derby prep races at the same track — the Grade 3 Lecomte Stakes, the Grade 2 Risen Star Stakes and the Grade 1 Louisiana Derby, finishing fourth, second and fifth, respectively. Those efforts accrued enough points for a spot in the starting gate at Churchill, but Asmussen said Saturday that he and the owners want to get the colt back to 100% for Preakness and “don’t want two negative races in a row.”

“We don’t want to waste a horse that obviously showed a level of ability at 2 and early in the year,“ he later told Blood Horse. He can be a significant 3-year-old.”

Then there is the horse with local ties. Taj Mahal, under the tutelage of top Maryland trainer Brittany Russell, won the Federico Tesio Stakes on April 18, earning an automatic Preakness bid.

Twenty-four Tesio winners have gone on to run in the Preakness, and only one has managed to win it — Deputed Testamony, the last Maryland-bred to win the state’s preeminent race, in 1983.

Taj Mahal’s dominant 8 1/4-length win certainly makes him look like a real contender. And the colt has the pedigree, too. The Florida-bred son of Nyquist sold for $525,000 as a yearling in 2024.

Russell said after the race that she was hoping to see a “wow” effort from the colt to give her the confidence to level up to a Triple Crown race, and that’s what she got.

“I feel like it was a really big race, his first time going two turns,” she said. “We’ve learned so much about him each run. I feel like he continues to improve.”

Soon enough, a lot more will be learned about the rest of the horses making a bid for the Woodlawn Vase at Laurel. As it stands, there’s already a healthy dose of intrigue.