May 12, 2021
ANTHONY, Fla. Medina Spirit has been entered to run in the Preakness on Saturday, so Gail Rice is going to Baltimore. She has a plane ticket and a ticket to the race, with details still to be ironed out regarding a rental car and hotel. “And I have to buy a dress,” she says with one of her frequent laughs.
Rice helped bring Medina Spirit into this world literally pulling his forelegs out of his mother, Mongolian Changa, at a postage stamp of a farm here on April 5, 2018. She drove into the yard there isn’t much of a driveway that afternoon and saw that it was high time for a baby. So she grabbed her daughter-in-law, Emily, to assist.
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Medina Spirit fends off Mandaloun in the 2021 Kentucky Derby
The lyrics of Dan Fogleberg s song Run for the Roses, “the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance,” are well understood in assessing Medina Spirit, the winner of the 2021 Kentucky Derby. By measures of pedigree fashion, economic success, or marquee appeal, the dark brown son of Protonico and Mongolian Changa (by Brilliant Speed) was not a star.
But in the Grade 1 classic at Churchill Downs, the colt who cost $1,000 as a short yearling, by an under-appreciated sire and out of a mare who was given away, bucked the odds, flattened the probabilities, and looked like several million dollars as he led from early till late and won the Kentucky Derby by a half-length from Mandaloun (Into Mischief).
Medina Spirit a Diamond in the Rough for Whitman bloodhorse.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bloodhorse.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.