Matt King Coal Preps for Wood

Lady Sheila Stable's Matt King Coal (Cool Coal Man) continued preparation for a start in the Apr. 9 GI Wood Memorial with a six-furlong work in 1:13 over the Belmont training track Saturday. “He had a very nice breeze yesterday,” reported trainer Linda Rice. “He'll get one more before the Wood and we're pretty excited about the way he's come out of the allowance race and he better be on his best for the Wood.” Matt King Coal broke his maiden with a front-running 5 3/4-length victory at Belmont last October. He returned with a wire-to-wire allowance tally at Aqueduct Mar. 6 (video). Rice expects to see the same running style repeated in the Wood. “I would say Plan A is to continue to utilize his speed,” Rice said. “You never know at some point if there's going to be enough speed in a race to consider taking him back, but Jose [Ortiz] has ridden him and won a lot of races for me and I'm going to have to leave that up to him.” The Wood is also the target of Tom O'Grady's Cadeyrn (Malibu Moon). Trained by Jeremiah Englehart, the dark bay colt added blinkers and romped home by 11 lengths in a Feb. 20 Aqueduct maiden special weight (video). “He came out of that last race really well,” Englehart said. “I think the blinkers made the biggest difference. In the morning, he's one that has shown that he's a really nice horse, but in the afternoons he can play around a lot. It seems like every week, he's been getting better and better as far as his breezes go. We're looking forward to giving it a shot.”