PLETCHER-TRAINED SCALABLE OUTFINISH GUN SONG TO WIN SATURDAY’S $250,00 GRADE 3 MONMOUTH OAKS

By Tom Luicci —-

Scalable #1 with Paco Lopez riding won the $250,000 Grade III Monmouth Oaks at Monmouth Park Racetrack in Oceanport, NJ on Saturday July 27, 2024. 2nd was Gun Song #5 with Julien Leparoux. Photo By Bill Denver/EQUI-PHOTO

OCEANPORT, N.J. – After hinting for quite a while at having graded stakes potential Scalable finally delivered on that promise.

Winless in five previous graded stakes tries, the Todd Pletcher-trained Scalable outfinished 3-2 favorite Gun Song after a furious late rally to win Saturday’s 100th edition of the Grade 3, $250,000 Monmouth Oaks by three-quarters of a length at Monmouth Park.

The 3-year-old Kentucky-bred daughter of Speightstown followed the move of Gun Song coming out of the final turn in the mile and a sixteenth race and then prevailed in a three-horse stretch duel that included Little Jamie.

At the sixteenth pole Little Jamie was the first to give way, leaving the remaining stretch battle to Scalable and Gun Song, the winner of the Grade 2 Black-Eyed Susan Stakes at Pimlico.

Little Jamie held for third, 1¾ lengths behind Gun Song.

The winning time was 1:44.71.

“She’s been here (at Monmouth Park) a while now and has been training really good,” said Anthony Sciametta, who oversees Pletcher’s Monmouth Park division. “Once she was able to get to the outside, that’s really all she needed. It was an impressive race from her.”

Winless in three starts at 2, Scalable posted her third win in six starts this year. She came in off a win in a $100,000 optional claimer at Churchill Downs on June 29.

Owned by Repole Stable, Scalable paid $8.60 to win.

A late runner, Scalable was positioned third and fourth early in the eight-horse field by jockey Paco Lopez, with the early fractions going in :24.55, :48.72 and 1:13.03 for six furlongs.

Little Jamie made the first move after initially conceding the lead to Yes to Champagne, taking control midway through the final turn. She was followed immediately by Gun Song and then Scalable right behind the two of them, with the rest of the field out of it then.

“We were able to sit behind horses up the backstretch and she was going well,” said Lopez. “Once we angled out around the far turn, she really started to pick it up. In the stretch, the other horse (Gun Song) was tough, but we pushed by and she finished up well.”

In her five previous graded stakes tries Scalable had only hit the board once, though she was a respectable fifth in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile fillies last year.