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Trainer Steve Asmussen had won the Frizette Stakes at Belmont Park three times before this year, winning impressively with My Miss Aurelia (2011), Nickname (2015), and Wicked Whisper (2019), all of whom went on to successful racing careers, with My Miss Aurelia winning the Grey Goose Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies en route to being voted champion 2YO filly.
His fourth winner in the Frizette, Echo Zulu, may well be better than all of them, on the strength of her 7 1/4- length win Oct. 3. Now 3-for-3, she's never won by less than four lengths and is a two-time Gr.1 winner, her first Gr.1 victory coming in the Sept.5 Spinaway Stakes at Saratoga Race Course.
The daughter of Gun Runner was purchased at the 2020 Keeneland September Yearling Sale for $300,000 out of the Betz Thoroughbreds consignment by Winchell Thoroughbreds, who with Three Chimneys Farm campaigned the stallion to a near $16 million career. Winchell Thoroughbreds owns Echo Zulu in partnership with L and N Racing. She was bred in Kentucky by Betz/J. Betz/Burns/CHNNHK/Magers/CoCo Equine/Ramsby.
Echo Zulu is out of the Menifee mare Letgomyecho, whose abbreviated career included a win in the 2005 Stonerside Forward Gal Stakes at Gulfstream Park. She has been a prodigious producer of graded stakes performers and six-figure earners, including J Boys Echo (winner of the 2017 Gotham Stakes), Echo Town (winner of the 2020 H. Allen Jerkens Stakes Presented by Runhappy), and Unbridled Outlaw (third in the 2015 Iroquois Stakes, G3). Letgomyecho's last reported foal, a yearling American Pharoah filly named Doing Justice, sold for $1.4 million to Northshore Bloodstock, agent for Joe Allen, at the recent Keeneland September sale.