Photo:

Eclipse Sportswire – edited composite

Never mind the last year and change. The whirlwind for
Cherie DeVaux may have reached the max in the last seven days.

She saddled More Than Looks, who made a late charge to get
within a length of Carl Spackler and finish second last Saturday in the $1,065,625
Turf Mile (G1) at Keeneland.

Not long after that, DeVaux and her husband David Ingordo, a
bloodstock agent, were on a plane to England for this week’s first book of the Tattersalls
yearling sale. On behalf of Determined Stables, Ingordo bought three fillies by
Camelot, Siyouni and Mehmas for nearly $800,000.

On Friday came the trip back to Keeneland, where DeVaux will
prepare morning-line favorite She Feels Pretty to race against nine other
3-year-old fillies in the Grade 1, $750,000 Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup.

“We’ll be there for works on Saturday and the races,” DeVaux
said in a Thursday phone call from Newmarket. “I may not be the most spirited,
but I will definitely be there. Physically I’ll be there. Mentally I might
still be a couple hours one way or the other.”

Flights may get DeVaux, 42, back and forth across the
Atlantic, but She Feels Pretty has helped take her to career heights including her
first Grade 1 triumph last fall in the Natalma Stakes at Woodbine and an
agonizingly narrow loss in the 2023 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf.

That tantalizing third-place finish by only half-length at
Santa Anita has become a microcosm for the $240,000 daughter of Karakontie. Her
6: 3-1-2 record says she never has been out of the money, but She Feels Pretty
also has three losses by a half-length, three-quarters of a length and in
August by just a neck in the Lake Placid (G2) at Saratoga.

Those hand-wringing defeats led DeVaux to do a little
tweaking for Saturday’s QEII. In other words, blinkers on.

“Her last two races, she has run very good races, but she’s
not been kicking clear of the horse next door,” DeVaux said on Horse Racing
Nation’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod. “It cost her a win in her last race.”

She Feels Pretty and Grayosh both closed late in that 1
1/16-mile race, but the win went to Grayosh, who also comes back for the QEII.
In July the story was similar. She Feels Pretty dueled Segesta to the wire only
to have Cinderella’s Dream pass them both at the end of the 1 3/16-mile Belmont
Oaks Invitational (G1) at Aqueduct. It took a photo to determine Segesta had
gotten second by what the Equibase chart called a sliver.

“I don’t think she was a match for the winner of the Belmont
Oaks, but it definitely cost her a placing,” DeVaux said. “When horses range up
next to her, she just kind of seems to want to hang around with them.”

Thus the blinkers to focus She Feels Pretty on the task
straight ahead of her in Saturday’s 1 1/8-mile QEII. They are not intended to
hasten her from her usual tactic of racing from off the pace under her Hall of
Fame jockey John Velázquez.

“We don’t want to change her running style,” DeVaux said. “Nothing
like that. We just want her, when she makes her run, to just kick clear and
just keep to the task at hand. So when she’s in a battle head and head that she
kind of just worries about herself and not hanging out with her company.”

DeVaux did admit, however, the equipment change can be a
double-edged sword. Blinkers could encourage She Feels Pretty to get up and go sooner
than desired.

“We breeze them and give them plenty of opportunities in the
morning to see how they handle the blinkers,” DeVaux said. “With her she’s a
very good workhorse. If we, say, put her in company and said leave her company,
she breezes very fast. Really, it’s hard to emulate that. We really just watch
to make sure that a filly or a horse like her just doesn’t get too keyed up and
keen. But she’s been pretty agreeable, and it hasn’t really changed the way she
works. We just hope that that translates in the race where it doesn’t change
her running style, and she’s not too keen early and doesn’t expend that energy.”

One other thing that will be different this time is the fact
the QEII will be a home game for She Feels Pretty. That may be hard to define with
past performances showing six races at six different racetracks. Keeneland will
be her seventh, but that is her fulltime address this time of year.

“At Saratoga she did run out of her stall,” DeVaux said, “but
Keeneland is her home base. This is her first Keeneland (race), right? She went
from Belmont to Saratoga, but it’s just nice for a filly like her that she
could just have her same routine and just walk over to the races without too
much ado about anything.”

Unlike last year, the Breeders’ Cup is not a target for She
Feels Pretty, who would come close to $1 million in career earnings for owners
Roy and Gretchen Jackson with a first-place finish Saturday.

“It’s not something we really discussed,” said DeVaux, whose
$7,360,506 in 2024 earnings rank her 15th among all trainers from the U.S. and
Canada. “The target for her this year was the Queen Elizabeth. We’ll just have
to see how she runs. If she runs some race and comes out of it bouncing around,
it may be a conversation. Right now we’re just focused on this race.”