Spirit Gal (Fr)

Charles Fipke's Grade I winner and 'TDN Rising Star' Shirl's Speight (Speightstown) will become the first foreign horse to ever run in Japan's G1 February S., Fipke's advisor Sid Fernando confirmed to the TDN Thursday afternoon. Set for Feb. 19, the race is over a mile on the dirt, and trainer Roger Attfield and Fipke are both set to travel to the Tokyo showpiece. "He's going," Fernando said of the 2022 GI Maker's Mark Mile hero. "He's doing well with Roger Attfield down in Florida." The February S. is one...

LEXINGTON, KY--You may have seen in the news last week how they've just realised that a Mondrian masterpiece has been hanging the wrong way round for 77 years. That's just a year longer than Willie Browne has been accumulating his own perspectives on life and, when he looks at the filly he has brought to the Breeders' Cup, he pretty much knows that same, upside-down feeling. Because his long quest for the secrets of equine potential--which has so often brought him to this same town, wearing a very different hat--has...

Stepping up a furlong having broken her maiden at the third attempt over six at Naas Sept. 15, Charles Fipke's homebred filly Spirit Gal (Fr) (Invincible Spirit {Ire}) made all to annexe Friday's Listed Irish Stallion Farms EBF StarAppeal S. at Dundalk. Sent off the 4-1 joint-second favourite, the bay gave generously for Seamie Heffernan as she had last time and never let Ballydoyle's Cairo (Ire) (Quality Road) make a fight of it as she kept that 11-10 market-leader at bay to score by 2 1/4 lengths. "She is in...