With regular rider Jose Velez Jr. aboard the son of Jump Start and decked out in the green and black colors of majority owner Phantom House Farm, Cable Boy ripped off fractions of :22 2/5 and :45 3/5 before coming home his final eighth in :11 3/5. John Forbes, head of Phantom House and co-trainer of the colt with Patrick McBurney, caught him galloping out six furlongs in 1:09 4/5.
Forbes wanted to simulate race conditions as much as possible, having Cable Boy with silks and rider and being saddled with a field of horses. The near-black colt made an excellent appearance and was on his toes in the walking ring.
With his long strides, he appeared to be going slower than he was in the opening quarter. It was only until he hit the eighth pole that Velez started pushing on him a bit.
“We gallop him at 5:30 in the morning because sometimes when a horse comes up on him he’ll dive into the bit, so this was perfect not having another horse on the track with him,” Forbes said. “Not only did we have a nice clean racetrack with no hoof prints on it, he could feel those flags flapping and hear the horn, which you don’t get in the morning. It went just we planned; he went easy the first part and finished up the way we wanted.”
When Velez returned he told Forbes, “I was just sitting on him. Then, from the eighth pole to the wire I let him run, and let him gallop out. I couldn’t pull him up afterward.”
Cable Boy, co-owned by James Dinen, has won all three of his career starts at Monmouth, including a wire-to-wire 3 3/4-length victory in the Coronado’s Quest Stakes and a track-record romp in an allowance race in his second start, in which he covered the mile and 70 yards in 1:38 3/5. In his previous work on July 13 he worked a mile in 1:39 3/5.