Claret Beret dies after routine work following Grade 1 Apple Blossom win

Claret Beret was on the sharpest run of her career when it ended suddenly at Palm Meadows Training Center. The 5-year-old mare, owned by Miller Racing and trained by Saffie Joseph Jr., died May 22 after an apparent cardiac event following a routine morning work, a loss that landed hardest because she had just established herself among the country’s top dirt mares.

She completed a four-furlong breeze in :49.55 and returned to the barn before collapsing. Joseph said she died at the barn. For a horse with a résumé still building, the timing made the shock even greater: Claret Beret had already won two graded stakes in a row and was moving toward the year’s biggest filly-and-mare target, the Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Keeneland on October 31.

Her breakthrough came April 11 at Oaklawn Park, where she rolled to a 4 1/2-length victory in the $1.25 million Apple Blossom Handicap, the 58th running of the race. She finished the 1 1/16 miles in 1:42.21, the fastest edition of the race since Havre de Grace went 1:42.19 in 2011, and she did it in front of an estimated 40,000 fans. The Apple Blossom also delivered jockey Micah Husbands his first career Grade 1 victory, and it was a Win and You’re In race for the $2 million Distaff.

The Apple Blossom came two months after Claret Beret took the Grade 3 Royal Delta Stakes at Gulfstream Park by five lengths in 1:44.86 on February 14. That sequence confirmed the form that had been developing through a career that began with a claim and turned into a Grade 1 profile. She had been claimed for $62,500 by the Greg Compton barn for Danny Brown, Charis Brenneman and Compton Racing, LLC before Miller Racing later bought her privately after a fifth-place finish in an allowance race at Oaklawn on March 7, 2025.

Bred in Kentucky by Mitch Haynes and sold for $375,000 at the 2022 Keeneland September Sale, Claret Beret finished with a record of 7 wins, 1 second and 3 thirds from 19 starts and earnings of $1,115,834. In 2026 alone she had already banked nearly $785,000, a pace that made her one of the division’s rising forces. Her death leaves Miller Racing and Joseph without a mare who had become a legitimate championship threat, and it removes a recent Grade 1 winner from a Distaff picture that had only just begun to take shape.