Preakness Stakes favorite Muth scratched with fever

The morning-line favorite was scratched from this weekend’s Preakness Stakes causing a major shake on the pre-race odds board. 

Muth, who was an 8-5 favorite to win the Preakness earlier this week, won’t participate in the race after spiking a fever of 103 degrees on Tuesday evening after arriving at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.

“We are sick about this. The horse had been doing really well,” Bob Baffert, Muth’s trainer, said. “But we have to do what’s right by the horse.”

The field now drops to eight horses in a race that appears to be wide open. 

Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan now slots in as the presumed favorite to win the Preakness, the second leg of the Triple Crown.

Mystik Dan had been 5-2, the second-best odds behind Muth, before the announcement. 

Those are much shorter odds than he had ahead of the Kentucky Derby when he was 18/1 pre-race before winning by a nose in a photo finish.

Last week, after the horse’s Derby win, Mystik Dan had been 33/1 to pull off the Triple Crown, per bet365. Only 13 horses, and just two in the past 45 years, have pulled off the feat.

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“It’s a fragile game. It can happen to any of them,” Mystik Dan’s trainer, Kenny McPeek, said after Muth’s scratch, per BloodHorse. “Oh, my goodness. I guess it puts added pressure on us, but he’s ready.”

Muth, who won his last start in the Arkansas Derby on March 30 with Mystik Dan in the field, didn’t race in the Kentucky Derby because of Baffert’s ban from Churchill Downs due to “continued concerns regarding the threat to the safety and integrity of racing he poses to CDI-owned racetracks.”