Burnham Square, who went off at an unchanged 4-1, was not supposed to win the 2025 Blue Grasss Stakes, running dead last as East Avenue led the field up the Keeneland backstretch. But he started working up through the field into the second turn, which wasn’t the most economical way of getting up front, but coming out of the turn, jockey Brian Hernandez found a seam and got them clear. It seemed at the top of the stretch that one of the more expected challengers, Owen Almighty, was briefly poised to take down East Avenue, who had been showing admirable grit up front for most of the race.
Burnham Square had a different idea. He took aim at East Avenue and ran him down in a cliff-hanging stretch duel, hitting the wire a nose ahead. East Avenue gamely held on to place, and the expected favorite in the race, Todd Pletcher’s River Thames, showed.
Burnham Square’s time for the mile-and-an-eighth was 1:51.33, and he paid $10.48. East Avenue paid $6.42, and River Thames paid $3.24.
Jockey Brian Hernandez was full of compliments for his fellow athlete, saying: “Turning for home, he had a full head of steam. He swapped leads, and he just kept coming and coming and coming. He looks like the further he goes, the better it’ll be.”
That is a very good thing, because, with 130 Derby points now, Burnham Square has launched himself into the lead in the Kentucky Derby point standings, one point ahead of Sandman, and respectively eight and nine points ahead of Journalism, in third, and Bob Baffert’s Rodriguez, in fourth.
Burnham Square’s next race will be at a mile-and-a-quarter. For his part, trainer Ian Wilkes said that he had “trained him a little harder because I needed (Kentucky Derby) points.” Now perched with his athlete at the very top of the points leaderboard, he certainly got those, but he admitted to honest surprise that Burnham Square, who had turned in a middling-to-lackluster fourth-place run in the Fountain of Youth, was in the winners’ circle.
Acknowledging the tight, tough field his athlete had just bested, the trainer said, “You’d probably have to pinch me, because if you’d asked me before the race, I wouldn’t have dreamed I’d be right here with him.”
East Avenue’s trainer, Brendan Walsh, came away from the race quite grateful for the gritty place showing. The trainer said, “He looked at the head of the straight like he was going to fold, but he didn’t, he battled. I loved what I saw today.” With sixty points in 14th place in the Derby standings, East Avenue seems well above this year’s cut, but his connections are still mulling an appearance on May 4 in the Churchill gate.