Future bright for Gatsas-owned filly Negligee

ARCADIA, Calif. – Negligee won't bring the crystal trophy for the $2 million Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies home to Manchester, but her connections have every confidence that great things are ahead for their two-year-old Thoroughbred.

Negligee, owned by the Sovereign Stable (managed by the Gatsas family of New Hampshire), experienced a good deal of trouble in the 1 1/16 mile race for the world's most elite two-year-old fillies and finished sixth as the 5-1 third choice in the field of 12. She Be Wild and Beautician, a pair of long-shots, were the top two finishers and favored Blind Luck rounded out the trifecta.

"We had no racing luck," said Mike Gatsas, who watched the race at Santa Anita Park with a group of 20 individuals who own shares in the partnership.

"She's a nice filly and she would have been right there at the end if she'd had a better trip. With all that, she was still beaten by only about two-and-a-half lengths."

Negligee, trained by John Terranova and ridden by her regular jockey Rajiv Maragh, didn't break cleanly from the starting gate but still managed to be in position, only seven lengths off the pace setters, when the field turned for home. Maragh hit her left handed with his whip as encouragement, but the lightly-raced filly ducked from the sting, bumped into another horse in traffic, and was taken off stride.

"With a straighter trip down the stretch, we're a little closer," said Teranaova right after the race. "We might have gotten a piece of it, but that's racing."

The Kentucky-bred Negligee will have a complete post-race check up and as long as she comes back from the effort in fine form, she'll have a break and then be pointed toward what is expected to be a promising sophomore campaign in 2010.

"So far, so good, but we'll see early in the morning how she is," said Gatsas. "We've got a good filly and hopefully the luck will come back to us. In these big races today, you could see that the winners were all the ones who had the racing luck. But she didn't have any. You could see that when she passed the finish line, she still galloped past all of them."

Negligee, a beautifully conformed daughter of Northern Afleet, was making only the sixth start of her career but she is already a Grade 1 winner. While she wasn't able to add a consecutive Grade 1 stakes victory to her past performance lines yesterday, she must still be considered one of the top horses of her gender and in her age group. With her level of talent and ability, she can only get better with more racing experience.

"We'll find another big day for her," said Gatsas. "Good things are in her future."