Mother Nature, wary pilot force Casse to miss Tepin’s Woodbine Mile win

Mother Nature and a cautious pilot forced Mark Casse to miss his first-ever $1-million Ricoh Woodbine Mile win Saturday.

Heralded filly Tepin earned the half-length win over 23/1 longshot Tower of Texas at Woodbine Racetrack. The victory in her Canadian debut was the Casse-trained Tepin’s eighth straight and also the sixth in as many starts this year.

It was North America’s reigning champion turf female’s first race since winning the Group 1 Queen Anne Stakes at England’s Royal Ascot on June 14. But Casse never got to watch as bad weather grounded him in Lexington, Ky., where he was attending the Keeneland September Yearling Sale.

Casse was scheduled to fly to Toronto early Saturday in a private plane with Scott Dilworth, the co-owner of Tower of Texas. But poor weather scuttled those plans.

“We were supposed to fly at 11 a.m. . . we got a call around 10 a.m. that one of the pilots said he’d fly and the other one said he wouldn’t,” Casse said via telephone Friday. “They asked me what I wanted to do and I said, ‘Well, I want two pilots who want to fly.’

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“I’d rather be on the ground wishing I was in the air than be in the air wishing I was on the ground. I thought it was pretty well a no-brainer as much as I wanted to be there.”

But Casse, eight times Canada’s top conditioner, knew Tepin was in good hands, namely his son, Norman, an assistant trainer with Casse Racing.

“If I hadn’t felt so comfortable with Norman and our team, I would’ve been there earlier on,” Casse said. “The truth is Norman knows her probably better than I do so I wasn’t concerned, I was just flying in for the race.

“For us, it (yearling event) is the biggest time of the year, it’s our draft. It’s where we buy future champions, hopefully. If you miss that, it could affect your next two or three years.”

Tepin, the 2/5 favourite, topped the eight-horse Mile field in 1:34.13 on a good turf despite tiring near the end. It rained most of the day but as Tepin and the other horses came on to the track, the sun and a rainbow appeared.

“People said she maybe didn’t bring her ‘A’ game, I disagree,” Casse said. “Roger (Hall of Fame trainer Roger Attfield) had Tower of Texas ready but there were some good horses in the race.

“She’s at a point where as she’s gotten older she does what she has to do. She’s not the easiest to train because she doesn’t put a lot of effort into her training. That’s why we like running her, she does well when she gets into some kind of race cycle.”

Casse, a recent Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame inductee, said Tepin came out of the Mile very well. She has resumed training for her next race, either the US$1-million Shadwell Mile or $400,000 First Lady on Oct. 8 at Keeneland, before making an expected title defence in the $2-million Breeders’ Cup Mile on Nov. 5 at Santa Anita.

“For her to have her best chance of winning the Breeders’ Cup Mile, she probably needs to run again,” Casse said.

Dan Ralph, The Canadian Press