Shadwell Stable's Mohaymen (Tapit), perfect in five career trips to the post, turned in his final serious drill ahead of next Saturday's GI Xpressbet.com Florida Derby, breezing a half-mile Thursday morning at Palm Meadows.
With regular exercise rider Miguel Jaime aboard, the $2.2 joint sales-topper from the 2014 Keeneland September Yearling Sale was timed in :48.95, the ninth-best of 36 moves at the distance. It was Mohaymen's third work since winning the GII Fountain of Youth S. Feb. 27.
Trainer Kiaran McLaughlin is in Dubai preparing his four runners for Saturday's Dubai World Cup program, but he received a video of the breeze from his sister-in-law and assistant Trish McLaughlin. Her husband, Kiaran's brother Neal, has been supervising the string in Dubai since January.
“I got a tape of his work and Trish said it went fabulous,” Kiaran McLaughlin said. “He looked great and everything is on target.”
Mohaymen was originally scheduled to have his final pre-race drill Friday, but with an uncertain weather forecast, Kiaran McLaughlin elected to push it forward by a day.
“We're OK. We got our work in,” McLaughlin said when reached by phone by Gulfstream publicity in Dubai. “It looks like it's going to rain the next five days so we didn't want to chance it. We would have probably been fine if we didn't work at all but being that we could work, we wanted to do it. That's why we work on Fridays, so we have Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday to work. It looked like rain every day, so we wanted to get our last work in. If it rained and we didn't get it in, we didn't get it in. But he's on a good schedule and it worked out well. We're all happy.”
Only five others are likely to tackle Mohaymen in the Florida Derby, including champion and fellow unbeaten Nyquist (Uncle Mo). The Paul Reddam-owned and Doug O'Neill-trained sophomore is due to arrive in South Florida Mar. 28.
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