Trendsetter storms home at Keeneland to upset Lexington Stakes at 32-1

Trendsetter turned Keeneland’s Lexington Stakes into a surprise that reshaped the late spring 3-year-old conversation, even if only briefly on the Derby trail. Sent off at 32-1, the Modernist gelding rolled down the center of the track and drew clear by 2 1/4 lengths over The Hell We Did, with Corona de Oro third, in 1:44.51 for 1 1/16 miles on a fast track.

The result mattered because the Lexington still awards Kentucky Derby points on a 20-10-6-4-2 scale, and Trendsetter collected 20 of them. That moved him onto the board in the Road to the Kentucky Derby standings, but not nearly enough to make him a realistic Derby starter. More importantly, Ben Colebrook made it clear the colt was never in the barn’s Louisville or Baltimore script. “No Kentucky Derby. No Preakness. We didn’t even nominate him,” Colebrook said.

That is what made the performance so striking. Trendsetter had already won his first two starts at Colonial Downs last summer, including a restricted stakes, and he came into the Lexington off a third-place finish in the Rushaway Stakes at Turfway Park on March 21. But this was his first start around two turns on dirt, and he handled the new test like a colt who had finally put the pieces together. Kazushi Kimura kept him in an inside trip while he sat fifth through a half-mile in :47.92, then angled three wide into the lane and let him finish. He responded with a decisive burst that made the long price look absurd only after the race was over.

Trendsetter’s upset also gave Colebrook another spring headline at Keeneland a week after Percy’s Bar won the GI Central Bank Ashland, a run that has put his barn squarely in the middle of the meet’s biggest conversations. For a trainer who was not expecting this kind of jump from a colt making his first two-turn dirt start, the win changed the immediate business equation as much as the racing one. Trendsetter improved to 8 starts with 3 wins, 1 second and 1 third, and his bankroll climbed to $421,962.

The colt, owned by Midway Racing LLC, Davant Latham’s operation, and bred in Kentucky by Circle B Family Farm, now looks less like a Derby anomaly than a useful late-developing stakes horse with options. The Lexington has long been the final Kentucky Derby prep and has produced names like Swale, Charismatic, Owendale and Arabian Lion, but this year it may be remembered less as a direct Derby launchpad than as the race that exposed how fluid the 3-year-old division still is outside the top tier. Trendsetter’s win made that point loudly, and at $66.68 to win, no less.