Always Hopeful Update

Always Hopeful recently shipped down to South Florida to Palm Meadows Training Center for the winter and has been putting in the foundation for a return to the races. Unfortunately, Always Hopeful’s training has not been where all parties would like it to be. Trainer Cherie DeVaux considered his last work at Keeneland to be a “backwards” breeze, meaning the gelding put all of his effort in the early stages and lacked energy to finish the work optimally.

Always Hopeful has always been a difficult horse to train because of his aggressive approach and over the last month he has been especially tough. Not only is his training style taking a toll on him mentally, it also has been demanding on him physically. As you know, this has been an ongoing issue for Always Hopeful since he began training in 2021 and at close to 4 years old now this behavior is unlikely to change despite implementing different training techniques and gelding him.

In assessing his future racing opportunities with our team, Cherie, and our partners, we believe there may be limited upside to continue campaigning Always Hopeful for the long term. The considerations discussed were his distance limitations with how he trains and runs (he’d be limited to the shortest of sprint races), frequency of races, class level, etc. While Always Hopeful may be able to win a first-level allowance race, it would likely come on a smaller circuit with reduced purse money and after that he could quite possibly be relegated to the claiming ranks. And that’s okay if we’re confident he could consistently run and pay his way. But that of course comes with the assumption that he’s able to start stringing together frequent and competitive races. Due to various health issues, he’s only raced three times to this point in his career. With the factors mentioned above, it’s far from a sure thing that he’d be able to accomplish that.

For the short term, we’re going to give Always Hopeful another opportunity to earn his way back into the starting gate and see if he can perform optimally. At the same time, we’ll also enter him in the January sale at Keeneland as an option to have if we’re not seeing that much-needed progression. We’ll check back in with Cherie shortly on additional progress reports and a potential race target.