It is fitting that the winner was trained by Steve Asmussen. It was Asmussen who trained the 2017 Horse of the Year and ultimately the Hall of Famer Gun Runner, after whom the race is named. Asmussen has started piling up wins in the race. He won the first edition of the Gun Runner in 2021 with Epicenter, added a second win with Track Phantom in 2023 and has now scored a third win with Chip Honcho.
Chip Honcho and winning jockey Paco Lopez, who many expected to set the pace, instead sat in second place for much of the race, while Crown the Buckeye, a double stakes winner in the Ohio-bred company, beat him into the lead, posting fast fractions of :23.62, :46.66 and 1:10.98. Crown the Buckeye opened a length advantage at the halfway mark, but ran out of gas late and ran his final sixteenth of a mile in: 07.61.
“At the 16th pole I thought, where’s the wire? I needed it,” said Crown the Buckeye jockey Jareth Loveberry, who praised Crown the Buckeye’s efforts.
Chip Honcho managed to pass the leader. He hit the wire in 1:44.76 for 1 1/16 miles on a fast track and paid $9.80 to win.
Coming in from fifth place in the field of six, Liberty National caught Crown the Buckeye ahead of the spot, three-quarters of a length behind the winner. He didn’t accelerate as quickly as he did in a maiden win last month at Churchill Downs, with jockey Brian Hernandez Jr. after the race theorized that the colt might not have been as comfortable inside. Liberty National galloped ahead of the rest of the field.
Crown the Buckeye held steady for the show ahead of Quality Mischief in fourth place and Very Connected in fifth.
The first five finishers earned qualifying points at the Road to the Kentucky Derby, presented by Woodford Reserve, on a 10-5-3-2-1 basis.
The winner, a two-year-old Connect son of Leland Ackerley Racing, won for the second time in three starts. He was a front-runner at Churchill Downs on November 20 in the first specialweight company over a mile and finished in second place in his Keeneland debut when racing over seven furlongs on October 16.
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