Four Schools, a stakes winner in each of the last two years, will carry the 158-pound high weight in Saturday’s $45,000 Budweiser Imperial Cup, featured race of the season-opening Aiken Steeplechase in Aiken, South Carolina. The Budweiser Imperial Cup attracted a field of five for the two-mile race over National Fences.
Robbie Walsh will ride Mrs. George L. Ohrstrom Jr.’s Irish-bred Four Schools for trainer Richard Valentine. At the Monmouth Hunt Races at Monmouth Park in New Jersey last September, Four Schools and Walsh scored a 1 1/2-length victory in the $52,500 Helen Haskell Sampson Memorial Hurdle. In 2008, the gelding won the $62,000 David L. (Zeke) Ferguson Memorial Hurdle at Colonial Downs in Virginia.
