This wasn't the plan. Jon Green, the general manager of D.J. Stable, and trainer Mark Casse were ready to give 3-year-old filly champion Nitrogen (Medaglia d'Oro) a nice break after her second-place finish in the GI Longines Breeders' Cup Distaff. But just 67 days after her last race, she will go in Saturday's GIII Bayakoa Stakes at Oaklawn, where she is the 4-5 morning-line favorite.
Why? Because Nitrogen was telling Casse that she had had enough of taking it easy.
“The game plan, initially, was that when she was done with her championship campaign in 2025, we were going to give her two to three months off,” Green said. “Not only did she hit the board in every single one of the nine races she ran in last year, but she shipped around a lot to Florida, Kentucky, New York, back to Kentucky, and then all the way out to Del Mar for the Breeders' Cup.
“Our full intention was to give her time off, let her relax and regroup for her 4-year-old campaign,” he said. “Like everything else in life, man plans and God laughs, and in this case Nitrogen had the last laugh. She is such a professional and loves training and loves what she's doing. We basically gave her three, three-and-a-half weeks off. Then Hall of Fame trainer Mark Casse called me and he said, 'I know the game plan was to give her time off. She doesn't want it. She wants to train and is sound and is doing well.' He said that his concern was that if he didn't train her, mentally, she might get a little sour on us and that's not what you want to do, especially with a filly.
“So we put her back in light training because she didn't lose a lot of fitness and she picked it up very quickly,” said Green. “Our original intention was to focus on the Mar. 7 [GII] Azeri [Stakes] as a stepping stone to the [Apr. 11] [GI] Apple Blossom [Handicap], but she's ready to run. Is she 100 percent tuned up all the way for the Bayakoa? No. But she's probably 80 percent there and we feel like rather than give her another five weeks off, we would run her in this race.”
Though he said his filly will be only 80 percent for the race, Green has no problem predicting that this will be the start of a big year for Nitrogen.
“I'm not concerned about whether she'll take a step forward because I genuinely think she ranks atop that division right now,” he said. “Now, she has to fulfill her destiny.”
Green added that the plan is to run in the Azeri, as well. After the Apple Blossom, he's not sure what path his Eclipse Award winner will be taking.
Jon and Len Green after Nitorgen's Alabama win | Sarah Andrew
“We're trying to take it the way Bill Parcells used to look at the NFL schedule back when it was 16 games,” Green said. “He would say there are four quarters to the season and I'm going to look at it one quarter at a time. That's really the way we are managing Nitrogen. We'll look at it every three or four months and try to work backwards from a signature race. For this quarter, it's the Apple Blossom.”
D.J. Stable has never been afraid to sell a mare when she has reached peak value. Green said that the idea was discussed, but ultimately Nitrogen was just one they couldn't send to auction.
“We did look at it from a business standpoint so far as whether we should cash in on her,” Green said. “We also had to take in the fact that my father [Len] is almost 90-years-old. Not that this is his last hurrah. But when you have a homebred like this and you want to keep the family, it's difficult to entertain offers.
“We did, however, sell Tiffany Case, her mother, in foal to Not This Time,” he said. “She topped the January Sale for $3.2 million, so I feel like we cashed in on the family and we still have Nitrogen and Nitrogen's half-sister, a Gun Runner 2-year-old named Sniper that we're going to keep and race as well. We're fundamentally treating this as a business. We sold off some of the assets that we had because of Nitrogen's great year and her Eclipse win. But for right now, we are really enjoying campaigning the big mare.”
It will be a busy Saturday at Oaklawn for the Casse-D.J. team, which will also send out 2025 GI Arkansas Derby winner Sandman (Tapit). He'll go in a $126,000 allowance race run at a mile-and-a-sixteenth. Unlike Nitrogen, he did not have the strongest of finishes to his season. After a fifth-place effort in the GII Jim Dandy at Saratoga in late July, the colt turned in a ninth-place showing when trying the grass for the first time in the GIII DK Horse Nashville Derby Invitational Stakes at Kentucky Downs in late August.
“We ran him in the Jim Dandy and he ran a very tepid fifth place,” Green said. “In the Jim Dandy, we tried to put the blinkers on him to induce him to be a little closer to the lead and that didn't necessarily come to fruition. We tried him on the turf because the family had succeeded on the grass before and we thought maybe his going almost a mile-and-a-half would be a good distance for him, and he never really picked up his feet. At that time, he was telling us, 'I need a break.' He had been campaigning at a top level, really, from the moment we bought him. He never got a chance to get a mental break. We opted to pull the plug on him after the Kentucky Downs race and then did a minor surgery on an ankle.”
Green said that he is also hearing good reports from Casse regarding Sandman's comeback.
“Just like with Nitrogen, he's been moving forward by leaps and bounds,” he said. “We did not anticipate running him in February. We thought it might be a little later, maybe once at Oaklawn, once at Churchill, and then have a tough campaign for him going forward. The special ones, the ones with talent, they leap over your expectations. That's why we have Sandman in this race. He's ready to go.”
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