Prairie Meadows Cornhusker Handicap
horse race
The Prairie Meadows Cornhusker Handicap is an American Grade III thoroughbred horse race held annually at the end of June at Prairie Meadows in Altoona, Iowa. The race is open to horses age three years and older and currently offers a purse of $300,000. Raced at a distance of 11⁄8 miles on dirt, from 1966 through 1973 it was run at 11⁄16 miles.
Inaugurated in 1966, the Cornhusker Handicap was originally run at the Ak-Sar-Ben Racetrack in Omaha, Nebraska which closed in 1995. The first edition was won by Royal Gunner who was ridden by future U.S. Racing Hall of Fame inductee Bill Hartack.
Julie Krone was the first female jockey to compete in the Cornhusker Handicap and the first female jockey to win it when she captured the 1988 edition aboard Palace March.
The Cornhusker Handicap purse was reduced to $100,00 in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic along with the Iowa Derby and Iowa Oaks purses.
Records
Time record: (at current distance of 1+1⁄8 miles)
1:46.62 – Beboppin Baby (1998)
Most wins:
2 – Vale of Tears (1968, 1969) and Joey Bob (1972, 1973)
Most wins by a Jockey:
4 – Larry J. Durousseau (1967, 1968, 1969, 1970)
Most wins by a Trainer:
3 – Brad H. Cox (2014, 2020, 2021)
3 – Albert Vizcaya (1968, 1969, 1970)
3 – Jack Van Berg (1972, 1973, 1985)
3 – Steve Asmussen (2013, 2017, 2024)
Most wins by an Owner:
3 – Mrs.
“Prairie Meadows Cornhusker Handicap” enters the record as horse race. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Prairie, Meadows and Cornhusker can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prairie Meadows Cornhusker Handicap” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.