Gimme A Nother scratched due to training injury.
One Stripe drew the No 1 gate for the Breeders’ Cup Mile at Del Mar racecourse in California on Saturday.
Despite the pole position advantage, the South African-bred and raced star is the 30-1 rank outsider in US betting for the $2-million Grade 1 contest on turf.
Jockey Juan Hernandez, the leading jockey at Del Mar, gets the ride on the four-year-old colt who will be saddled by trainer Graham Motion.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s other Breeders’ Cup entry, mare Gimme A Nother, was scratched from the Filly & Mare Turf race at the meeting shortly before final declarations and draws on Monday.
Motion said Gimme a Nother, a six-time graded or group stakes winner, suffered a minor splint bone injury at a workout at the trainer’s Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland last week.
The five-year-old will stay in training for a 2026 campaign.
‘Racing biggest stage’
The ultra-prestigious Breeders’ Cup event – hosted annually at various tracks around the US – is described by the Americans as World Championships and “racing’s biggest stage”.
One Stripe, winner of the Cape Guineas and the L’Ormarins King’s Plate at Kenilworth in Cape Town when trained by Vaughan Marshall, was bred by Drakenstein Stud in Western Cape and is owned by Hollywood Syndicate and Rikesh Sewgoolam of Durban.
The four-year-old colt has had one outing in North America, in a Grade 2 race at Woodbine in Canada, in which he was fifth but did not have the best of passages.
One Stripe will line up against likely favourite Notable Speech (drawn 2), owned by Godolphin, trained in the UK by Charlie Appleby and ridden by William Buick.
Another big runner in the Breeders’ Cup Mile will be Ireland’s The Lion In Winter (4), from Coolmore, the world’s leading trainer Aidan O’Brien and jockey Christophe Soumillon.
$34-million in purses
Horses from five continents are carded for the Friday and Saturday meeting – including 58 from abroad.
Contenders hail from Argentina, Canada, Chile, England, Ireland, France, Japan, Peru, South Africa, the US and Uruguay.
The 14 Grade 1 races carry more than $34-million in purses and the headline event is the $7-million Longines Breeders’ Cup Classic, raced on dirt over 2000m.
The first three finishers in last year’s Classic – Sierra Leone (US), Fierceness (US) and Forever Young (Japan) will rejoin battle – alongside leading three-year-olds Sovereignty and Journalism, who dominated the 2025 Triple Crown in the US.
Del Mar – “Where the Turf Meets the Surf” on the shores of the Pacific Ocean – hosts the Breeders’ Cup for the fourth time, following a record-setting 2024 edition that achieved a new global wagering benchmark of $203.7-million.
The Breeders’ Mile is carded to start at 1.05am on Sunday, SA time.
