Trainer Bobby Dibona wasn’t surprised when he watched jockey Pedro Cotto Jr. ride Cuba across the finish line to win the Jim McKay Maryland Million Classic at Laurel Park on Saturday.
“When this race came up on the light side I thought we had to take a shot,” Dibona told reporters. “He has run well on short rest so it worked out beautiful. He is the coolest horse. He is great to be around — he does everything like a champ. Don’t you think he didn’t know for one minute what was going on.”
Cuba, a 7-year-old stallion sired in Maryland and raised in New Jersey, claimed $165,000 of the event’s $300,000 purse for holding off Diamond David and defending champion Evil Storm in a race for horses sired by the state’s stallions.
The Maryland Million, which is the state’s premier race behind the Preakness, was Cuba’s seventh victory in his past 10 races. The horse powered past Diamond David and Evil Storm down the stretch to win the 1 and 3/16th-mile race by four lengths in 1:57.78 in front of a crowd of 24,442.
“We were in a good position throughout the race to win if we had enough horse,” Michael Gorham, Evil Storm’s trainer, told reporters after the race. “I thought at the top of the lane we might have enough kick to challenge the winner, but he is a good horse. We ran our race and we just weren’t good enough.”
