Sarah Sis took several turns around the shedrow before going out for a light jog Monday morning, her feet piercing the brown dirt with every step. Ingrid Mason sat on her pony just outside the barn, half under the overhang and half out in the open air. She liked what she saw as the filly loosened up.
“Go ahead, give her another turn,” she told her small crew.
The 4-year-old Sharp Humor filly got another turn and looked completely settled in at Saratoga, where she returned this year with hopes to improve on last year as her connections chase more graded stakes success. Sarah Sis will try to do just that in today’s Grade 2 Honorable Miss Stakes, a race Mason and owner Joe Ragsdale plan to use as a prep for the Grade 1 Ballerina next month.
Sarah Sis finished fourth in last year’s Ballerina, facing older fillies and mares, during her 3-year-old campaign that featured stops at Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Oaks, Prairie Meadows for the Iowa Oaks and Keeneland for the Raven Run. She won the latter two, against other members of her generation. The Ballerina wasn’t on the original docket.
“Last year I ran her against older horses in the Ballerina and the reason we did that was because we missed the Test because she choked the day before I was going to ship her,” Mason said Monday, going over training charts for her string at Saratoga and divisions at Churchill Downs and Arlington Park. “We had her going on the van, they called me at 3 in the morning and said, ‘Ingrid, she didn’t eat last night,’ I thought, ‘not good.’ She’s a good doer and when she’s not herself I worry about it.
“We looked into it a little further, pulled blood on her and her blood was out of whack. Low protein, all kinds of stuff. I sent her to get her gut scoped and her gut was fine, but my vet seemed to think she had a lower abdominal ulcer, so you can’t see it with a scope but when we scoped her she had choked and her esophagus was tore up pretty bad. The stress of that was what made her go off her feed. It was a scary deal but luckily she cleared it on her own.”
To read the rest of the Honorable Miss preview, download Wednesday’s digital edition of The Saratoga Special presented by Keeneland Sales.
