Something odd was happening as parimutuel bets placed on the Grade 3 Peter Pan Stakes on May 13 at Belmont Park began accumulating. Bishops Bay, from the barn of multiple Eclipse Award-winning trainer Brad Cox, was the obvious Peter Pan favorite, yet a colt who had notched a second-start maiden win about two months earlier at Gulfstream Park, Arcangelo, was taking surprising action. For good reason. Bishops Bay, a talented colt, ran to expectations. In the end, Arcangelo simply outran Bishops Bay. The Peter Pan win was only the beginning. The Peter Pan marked the second graded stakes victory for Arcangelo’s trainer, Jena Antonucci. A month later, Antonucci became the first woman to train a Triple Crown winner when Arcangelo blitzed eight rivals, including champion 2-year-old Forte, winning the Grade 1 Belmont Stakes by 1 1/2 lengths. Antonucci’s homestretch exhortations to her horse and jockey Javier Castellano, directed first at a television monitor in the box seats where she watched the race and then out onto the racetrack, turned into racing’s most memorable moment of 2023. And while Arcangelo’s season ended disappointingly, the colt is an obvious finalist for champion 3-year-old male. :: Full list of 2023 Eclipse Awards finalists, including profile stories A rags-to-riches narrative impels the Arcangelo story. While Arcangelo is by the late Arrogate, a champion himself, he is the only accomplished runner produced by the unraced Tapit mare Modeling. Bred by the Don Alberto Corporation, who paid $2.85 million at auction to acquire Modeling, Arcangelo sold at Keeneland’s September 2021 yearling auction for a mere $35,000, the same as Arrogate’s final published stud fee. His purchaser, Jon Ebbert, who campaigned Arcangelo under the nom de course Blue Rose Farm, had been a small-scale owner and sometime pinhooker since buying his first horse in 2008. Arcangelo had the pedigree to command attention from prominent buyers but went to auction as an immature ridgling who had been diagnosed with inflamed sesamoids and a sire whose star, at the time, had dimmed. Ebbert and Antonucci met at the Keeneland sale the day before Ebbert bought Arcangelo. Ebbert said he knew his purchase would require patience and that he wanted Arcangelo with a smaller stable. After being broken in Pennsylvania, Arcangelo went for further training to Antonucci’s Bella Inizio Farm in Florida. He debuted with a second in December at Gulfstream Park, followed by a modest fourth in January, before his maiden win in March. :: Bet with the Best! Get FREE All-Access PPs and Weekly Cashback when you wager on DRF Bets. While Antonucci never had trained a horse of Arcangelo’s quality, she held firm to a somewhat unorthodox manner of training the colt while insisting that training alone would get Arcangelo from the Belmont Stakes on June 10 to the Travers Stakes on Aug. 26. During the 10 weeks between races, Arcangelo posted only seven timed workouts. That was plenty. Long, powerful runs past the finish line and onto the backstretch punctuated those workouts, and Arcangelo’s daily gallops brimmed with verve. Racing for the first time over a wet surface, Arcangelo looked like the Travers winner nearly every step of a race he had all but won by the head of homestretch. The margin of victory would be one length. But the Travers would be Arcangelo’s final start. The colt went to California early to train for the Longines Breeders’ Cup Classic. Physical issues arose. “We ran out of time,” Antonnuci said. But not before Arcangelo provided his connections with the time of their racing lives. :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.