Last fall, John Servis had a 2-year-old Pennsylvania-bred son of Smarty Jones whom he liked so much that he was thinking the colt might get him back on the Kentucky Derby trail. Res Judicata finished second in the Pennsylvania Nursery at Parx Racing, and Servis sent him to Florida.
“Once I got him down there, the more I started doing with him, I realized he just wasn’t going to get that distance,” Servis said. “We elected to keep him sprinting.”
Res Judicata chased and tired in the Swale Stakes at Gulfstream and then ran strongly in a small stakes at Aqueduct. The horse has had other solid efforts in 2013 but usually would follow them with subpar races. It was puzzling.
The colt became a gelding this summer and promptly ran the fastest race of his career at Parx on Aug. 6. Res Judicata then ran terribly Sept. 21 in the Researcher Stakes at Charles Town. He got behind horses in the slop, rushed up, got tired, and shut it down.
The stable knew Res Judicata was better than that. In the $100,000 City of Laurel Stakes, the last of four consecutive stakes on a card last Saturday, Res Judicata was way better than that and quite a bit better than all the other horses in the race. Under Kendrick Carmouche, wearing the familiar blue and white silks of Pat Chapman’s Someday Farm, the horse broke sharply, prompted the pace, blew open the seven-furlong race on the turn, and won by 4 1/4 lengths.
That was Res Judicata’s final race of 2013. Servis is going to give the horse some time off and get him ready for some Pennsylvania-bred stakes in 2014. Ten years after Smarty Jones’s run through America, one of his sons will get a run through Pennsylvania. If he performs in those races anything like he did at Laurel Park, Res Judicata will be very difficult to beat.