Pletcher rebounds at Saratoga with two wins, nears 6,000 career victories
Pletcher stopped a sluggish Saratoga start with two Flavien Prat winners, lifting him to 5,988 career victories and easing the early-meet tension.
Todd Pletcher got Saratoga moving in the right direction on Sunday, winning two races from two starters on the nine-race card and climbing to 5,988 career victories. Both wins came with Flavien Prat aboard for Robert and Lawana Low, a pairing that gave the Hall of Fame trainer a needed lift after a hesitant opening to the meet.
Liam’s Law started the turnaround in race 4, taking a maiden special weight as a Colonel Liam colt and giving his sire his first winner. Highlands Way followed in race 8, closing from the back to win on the inner turf by a neck. The two horses were enough to halt a stretch that had left Pletcher with only one win, one second and three thirds from his first 14 Saratoga starts, a line that looked nothing like the barn that has owned this meet for years.
Pletcher’s Saratoga résumé is still the standard everyone measures against. He has won 14 training titles outright at Saratoga Race Course and shared another, and the Sunday double mattered because it pushed back against the kind of early-meet chatter that can snowball fast in Saratoga Springs. Pletcher had already been through a winless run in 27 starts at the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival, and his slow start on the Oklahoma Training Track had only sharpened the scrutiny.
The Sunday rebound also fit a pattern Pletcher has lived before. In 2017, he shook off a one-for-22 stretch and went on to finish with a record season, winning the Saratoga training title with 40 victories. More recently, he tied Chad Brown for the Saratoga title with 32 wins apiece at the 40-day meeting in 2025, a reminder that the Spa rarely stays quiet for long once the barns find their rhythm.
That is why the two wins carried more than a single afternoon’s value. Liam’s Law and Highlands Way did not just add numbers to the ledger. They gave Pletcher a reset heading into the rest of Saratoga’s stakes season, where another productive week would turn a shaky opening into little more than noise.
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