Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin LOUISVILLE, KY - MAY 03: Thorpedo Anna with jockey Brian J. Hernandez Jr. aboard wins the 150th .
.. [+] running of the Kentucky Oaks on May 3, 2024, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.
(Photo by Jeff Moreland/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Fierceness lived up to his billing and then some by taking the 2024 Travers Stakes, amusingly and fittingly, having to defend himself in the last furlong from a bright, game charge by Thorpedo Anna, just the fifth filly even to run in the Travers since 1960. Thorpedo Anna had already smoked the favored, late-running Sierra Leone in the stretch, and she was all business in the last furlong as she went about taking down Fierceness. She worked her way to just a head behind him when the finish line saved the colt from her.
Two more strides — or said another way, another furlong — and she would have been the first filly in a century to have taken the Travers. Her gallop out was clean and promising. Fierceness, who was rather curiously unloved by the late-afternoon money, paid a tasty $9.
80. Thorpedo Anna, who went off at 3-1, paid a flat $5.00 in place, and Sierra Leone, who went off at 8-5 as the odds favorite and who seems fated to place or show in Grade 1 stakes forever, paid an unremarkable $2.
20 in show. The early odds favorite, Belmont winner Dornoch, ran a dispiriting fourth. Thorpedo Anna, by contrast, did exactly what she thought she should do, namely, get out there and mix it up with the boys, expecting no quarter and giving none.
Her ferocious late charge on Fierceness was very nearly enough, but it is not to her discredit that her attempt at becoming the first filly in a century to take the race fell just short. As predicted in this space earlier today , she came out to mess up the boys’ hopes for the afternoon, and she handily put all of them save one behind her. In doing that, she beat the touted winner of the Belmont like a piñata.
No dishonor in that sort of heart. If by entering her in the Travers trainer Kenneth McPeek was looking, as he stated earlier in the week, to see whether Thorpedo Anna was “good” or “great,” then this remarkable Travers would tell him that she is the latter. Bred and part-owned by Judy Hicks, Thorpedo Anna will be minting gold in the breeding barn back home in Kentucky.
With luck, we shall see this tremendous athlete in the Breeders’ Cup..
