Allnight Moonlight Takes Don Stemmans Memorial Stakes at Evangeline Downs

Allnight Moonlight is starting to look less like a horse padding a résumé and more like one still climbing. The 6-year-old gelding handled the Don Stemmans Memorial Stakes at Evangeline Downs on April 11, covering 1 1/16 miles on a firm turf course in 1:44.69 and holding the field safe in Race 8 at 8:49 p.m. He paid $6.40 to win, a fair price for a runner who keeps proving he belongs in regional stakes company.

That matters in Louisiana, where durable state-breds have to stay sharp over more than one season and more than one surface. Allnight Moonlight already had a major turf score on his card, winning the 35th running of the Louisiana Champions Day Turf with Jose Ortiz aboard on December 13, 2025. This latest victory, with Isaac Castillo in the irons for owner Roger G. Smith and trainer Samuel Breaux, suggests the horse is not simply hanging around. He is still getting the job done when the conditions fit.

The race itself gave him every chance to use experience over flash. The official purse was $75,000, up from the $60,000 level used for the 2025 renewal, and the distance suited a turf horse with routing ability. Allnight Moonlight stopped the clock well off the course record of 1:40.74, which tells you this was not a speed-fueled stampede. It was a professional stakes run, and the winner was the horse who settled into the right rhythm and finished strongest when it counted.

For Calumet Farm stallion Ransom the Moon, the win carried another layer of significance. BloodHorse’s stakes listing marked Allnight Moonlight as the sire’s first black-type stakes winner, a milestone that gives this Louisiana-bred from Coteau Grove Farms value beyond one night at Evangeline. The colt is out of Gingertini by Medaglia d’Oro, and this result strengthens the case that his best races are still ahead of him, not behind him.

The race also kept Don Stemmans’ name where it belongs on the Louisiana calendar. Stemmans died on November 19, 2024, at 88, and tributes remember him as a longtime Evangeline Downs starter, a Louisiana horseman who served more than 20 years on the Louisiana Thoroughbred Breeders Association board, helped the Louisiana Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, and ran Stemmans Horse Supply in Carencro with his wife Janet starting in 1968. A stakes named for that kind of lifetime in the game now belongs to a horse that is still making his own case, one late-career win at a time.