FRANKLIN, Ky. – The 5-year-old horse Grand Sonata and the 29-year-old jockey Tyler Gaffalione make beautiful music together. Grand Sonata came into Saturday with four career wins, Gaffalione aboard for all of them, and the duo came out of the Kentucky Turf Cup with a half-length win over Highway Robber. The reunion between horse and rider came at an opportune and lucrative moment. The Grade 2 Turf Cup was worth $1,995,500, and Grand Sonata took home $1,195,200 of it for owner Whisper Hill Farm and trainer Todd Pletcher. Grand Sonata broke a seven-race losing streak that spanned more than a year. Gaffalione had been aboard for only one of those starts. :: Kentucky Downs Package Available Now - Get All Access PPs, Picks, Players Guide for just $20! “He’s always had a lot of bad luck, tough trips,” Gaffalione said. The trip Saturday was neither bad nor tough, and that owed everything to Gaffalione. Outrun down the backstretch of this 1 1/2-mile contest after breaking from the outside post in a field reduced to nine after two scratches, Gaffalione made a beeline for the rail before coming to the race’s final, long, sweeping bend. He beat Highway Robber to that spot, which might have been the difference between victory and defeat. Highway Robber had to come off the rail, knifed between rivals through the homestretch, ran alongside the winner in the final half-furlong but fell a half-length short, finishing second. “The 10 [Grand Sonata] cut the corner right in front of me at the five-eighths,” said Jareth Loveberry, who rode Highway Robber. Grand Sonata, treated coldly by the betting public, paid $32.78 as the sixth choice. He was timed in 2:24.93 over a firm course, breaking a track record set Thursday by Burrow, a horse racing for an $80,000 claiming tag. Tawny Port stalked the pace and ran to form finishing third, one length behind the improving 4-year-old Highway Robber, who was last in the early going and finished strongly in his first start going 1 1/2 miles. “He was just that relaxed today,” Loveberry said of his early position. Integration, the even-money favorite in his first start going 1 1/2 miles, finished an even fifth and was followed home closely by Anglophile and Cathkin Peak. Then came a large gap back to Get Smokin, last year’s Turf Cup winner, who was undone by a pace duel with Balladeer, a distant last behind King Curlin on Saturday. The opening quarter mile of the Turf Cup went in 23.65, the half in a punishing 47.53. Sugoi was an early scratch, while Chief Little Rock, who had shipped from Ireland for trainer Aidan O’Brien, was scratched by the stewards on the advice of the track veterinarian as the horses were approaching the starting gate. A 5-year-old homebred by Medaglia d’Oro out of A.P. Sonata, by A.P. Indy, Grand Sonata initially was campaigned more as a middle-distance horse, and Pletcher didn’t try him at 1 1/2 miles until his 16th start. That experiment did not go especially well, Grand Sonata checking in a well beaten sixth in the Turf Classic. That race was run over a yielding course Grand Sonata might not have liked, but the horse had shown affinity for Kentucky Downs, finishing second in the 2022 Dueling Grounds Derby. Grand Sonata missed by a nose in the United Nations on July 18 at Monmouth Park and might have felt the affect of that effort when regressing to soundly beaten fifth last month in the Sword Dancer at Saratoga. “They quickened away from me down the backside, kind of got away from me, but my horse was travelling well within himself today,” Gaffalione said. “He just kept building and building, and by the time I got to the quarter pole he was full of himself. A hole opened and he didn’t hesitate.” The Turf Cup is part of the Breeders’ Cup Challenge Series, and Grand Sonata earned automatic fees-paid entry into a Breeders’ Cup race and travel expenses to Del Mar. If he makes it to the Breeders’ Cup Turf and Gaffalione follows, don’t count him out. :: Want to learn more about handicapping and wagering? Check out DRF's Handicapping 101 and Wagering 101 pages.