Oak Grove, KY – Breeders Crown and Dan Patch Award winner Yo Tillie is slated to make her 4-year-old debut on Monday (April 27) at Oak Grove Racing, Gaming & Hotel in one of seven $50,000 first-round Kentucky Sire Stakes (KYSS) events on the 14-race program.
Yo Tillie won 11 of 12 starts and racked up $979,195 in purses in her sophomore season for trainer Andrew Harris, who shares ownership with William Pollock and Bruce Areman. Among those wins were her lifetime-best 1:50.2 score in the $250,000 New Jersey Classic final at the Meadowlands, a 1:51 win in the $400,000 Kentucky Sire Stakes Championship Series final at the Red Mile, and her season-ending 1:51.3 victory in the $664,500 Grade 1 Breeders Crown 3-Year-Old Filly Trot at Woodbine Mohawk Park.
The daughter of Tactical Landing-Consolidator has been installed as the 4-5 morning line favorite in the lone KYSS preliminary for 4-year-old trotting mares, which is carded as Race 11, and usual driver Todd McCarthy will line up behind her from post 6 in the nine-horse field.
Among the eight mares Yo Tillie will face are 2025 Grade 3 Simcoe winner and Grade 1 Kentucky Filly Futurity runner-up R Dutchess (post 5, Tim Tetrick, 5-1) and 2025 fall Kentucky Sire Stakes series champ Winnpanzee (post 4, Yannick Gingras, 6-1).
Another millionaire will make her 4-year-old stakes debut in Race 7 when Glenview Livestock’s The Last Martini will line up as the 2-1 morning line favorite in the second of two KYSS prelims for 4-year-old pacing mares.
The Huntsville-Martinique mare won six times as a sophomore, including her dead-heat 1:49.2 triumph with Dan Patch Award winner Miki And Minnie in the $600,000 Grade 1 Breeders Crown 3-Year-Old Filly Pace and her front-stepping 1:55 score in the $300,000 New York Sire Stakes championship. Doug McNair will drive The Last Martini from post 3 for trainer Jared Bako.
In addition to the first round of the spring Kentucky Sire Stakes series, 13 sophomore trotting fillies will contest a pair of $25,000 Oak Grove Trotting Oaks prep races — carded as Races 6 and 9 — in advance of next Monday’s (May 4) eliminations for both the Oaks and the Oak Grove Trotting Derby. The finals, worth a combined $800,000, head a blockbuster card of harness racing at the southwest Kentucky venue on Saturday, May 16.
First-race post time for this week’s pair of 14-race cards, scheduled for Monday and Tuesday (April 28), is 1:10 p.m. (CDT). For more information on racing at Oak Grove, including free past performance pages and race-by-race analysis from Ray Cotolo, visit oakgrovegaming.com. And for more information on the upcoming Oak Grove Festival of Racing, visit oakgrovederby.com.