Undefeated Zany Headlines Ashland Stakes Field at Keeneland Friday

Repole Stable's Zany brought a clean record into the Grade 1 Central Bank Ashland at Keeneland, where a compact field of seven 3-year-old fillies competed for 200 points on the Road to the Kentucky Oaks in the opening-day feature of the Spring Meet.

Todd Pletcher saddled the unbeaten filly with Irad Ortiz Jr. in the irons for the 1 1/16-mile test carded as Race 9 with a 5:16 p.m. ET post. Zany arrived at the Ashland off back-to-back victories: a Demoiselle (G2) triumph at Aqueduct to close out 2025 and a Suncoast win at Tampa Bay Downs to open her 3-year-old campaign. That two-race sequence, bridging a strong juvenile two-turn prep with a clean seasonal debut, made her the logical favorite.

Pletcher knows the Ashland well. Malathaat, Nest, and Leslie's Rose all came through his barn on their way to Ashland victories, and each used the race as a springboard toward Oaks ambitions. The reunion with Ortiz, who has piloted Pletcher fillies to previous Ashland wins, only added to Zany's credentials heading into the gate.

The most credentialed challenger was Percy's Bar, trained by Ben Colebrook for Hat Creek Racing. The filly carried elite juvenile form into her 3-year-old debut: a third-place finish in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies and a disqualification in the Alcibiades at Keeneland that cost her a result she had earned on the track. She tuned up for the Ashland with a bullet four-furlong breeze of :47 2/5 in late March, the sharpest pre-race signal that Colebrook had her ready to test Zany's unbeaten record at a mile and a sixteenth.

The remainder of the field included Mark Casse's French Friction with Cristian Torres, Bill Mott's Star Actress under Junior Alvarado, and Ian Wilkes' Omaha Bay with Javier Castellano, each entering from different form lines and looking to use the Ashland as a launching point of their own.

With 200 Oaks points for the winner, the Ashland rarely needs extra billing to justify its place at the top of the spring calendar for 3-year-old fillies. A sharp performance here can reorder the entire division; a slip sends connections scrambling to reassess. Zany's unblemished record stacked against Percy's Bar's high-class juvenile pedigree gave the race its central tension, and the Keeneland crowd got exactly the early-season storyline the Oaks trail needed.