Manny Franco seeks Saratoga breakthrough after dominant NYRA season

Manny Franco finished 2025 with 206 wins across NYRA’s six meets, but Saratoga still looked like the one place where his season could shift from efficient to defining. The 40-day summer meet at Saratoga Race Course in Saratoga Springs, New York opened July 10 and ran through Monday, September 1, with racing five days a week after opening week, 18 Grade 1 races and 64 stakes worth more than $20 million in purses, including the $1 million Whitney on August 2 and the 156th DraftKings Travers, worth $1.25 million, on August 23.

That schedule is why Franco’s Saratoga line mattered so much. He had already shown he could control the NYRA circuit, winning 53 races during the Belmont at the Big A spring-summer meet and eight more during the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival at Saratoga, then finishing 20 wins clear of Flavien Prat in that standings race. Saratoga was the outlier. Franco won only 20 races there in 2025, his lowest total since 2021, and he went 0 for 28 in stakes.

The split explains the pressure point. Franco won his fourth year-end NYRA title in 2025, after previous titles in 2018, 2019 and 2023, and he added 19 stakes victories on the circuit. But Saratoga does not reward volume alone. The meet compresses the entire rider hierarchy into six weeks, and the names around Franco were the same ones that usually decide the biggest races: Irad Ortiz Jr., Jose Ortiz, Prat, Tyler Gaffalione and Luis Saez. In an early-meet standings snapshot from July 2025, Irad Ortiz Jr. had 17 wins from 54 starts and Jose Ortiz had 15 from 59, a sign that the race for position was already tight.

Jose Ortiz also arrived after wins in the $12 million Dubai World Cup and the $2 million Stephen Foster with Magnitude, which only sharpened the competition Franco faced in the Spa. Even before Saratoga opened, his own ledger showed the scale of the challenge and the opportunity. Equibase listed Franco with 16,844 starts, 2,613 wins and $188,035,331 in career earnings as of July 4, 2026, along with 1,236 starts, 214 wins and $19,544,623 in 2025. His graded stakes wins included the Belmont Derby Invitational with Test Score and the Old Forester Bourbon Turf Classic with Spirit of St Louis in 2025, then the Pegasus World Cup Turf Invitational with Test Score and the Gotham Stakes with Iron Honor in 2026. Saratoga was the meet that could turn that kind of volume into the marquee wins that define a summer.