But Lynn Cash, whose farflung Built Wright Stable has made nearly 400 starts this year, thinks that for at least one of his horses, Double Crown, the Lasix ban in stakes races might just be his ace in the hole.

Double Crown is the 9-5 morning line favorite in Saturday’s $150,000 Maryland Million Classic, a nine-furlong test for older runners. No runners will be permitted to use Lasix.

“We use Lasix when we can, but I think possibly the lack of Lasix in a race maybe moves him ahead of the other participants because he seems to run well off Lasix,” Cash said of Double Crown. “Maybe we have a small advantage when it’s a Lasix-free race over the normal horse.”

Double Crown, a winner of nearly $750,000, has won twice in seven Lasix-free starts in the last two years, taking the Grade 2 Kelso for Cash and his wife Lola’s most consequential victory and, last time out, the $100,000 Polynesian Stakes at Pimlico, which he won by over four lengths in a dominant performance.

Double Crown and Ain’t Da Beer Cold are the only runners in the race’s main body to have won without Lasix, and that runner’s Lasix-free wins came three years ago, as a two-year-old.

Cash claimed Double Crown for $40,000 out of a race at Churchill Downs in June 2022. Since then, the now-six-year-old Bourbon Courage gelding has won four times with earnings closing in on a half-million dollars. Saturday’s Classic start will be Double Crown’s second straight in the Classic – he was fourth behind Ournationonparade a year ago – and third Maryland Million start overall. He finished second, behind Air Token, in the 2021 Sprint.

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“He’s six, fixing to be seven, and two or three months ago, I was thinking I probably need to drop him in somewhere and get my money back out of him and go find someone younger,” Cash, who has built his stable via the claimbox, admitted. “But then he won the 3X [third-level allowance] so nice, and then he comes through [in the Polynesian]. He just wanted them.”

That points to the one criticism one can make of Double Crown: his form can be a bit hit-or-miss. That may be a function of the company he’s kept – he’s been favored only four times in his 38-race career, just once in the 23 starts Cash has owned him. But Cash says there’s more to it than that.

“His form has been sporadic,” Cash acknowledged. “If you put him in eight or 10 races, you know, he’s gonna fire in one or two and come through. There are times you think the horse can’t run at all, but some of that might be because [of the tough company].”

Cash was the trainer of record for his horses until earlier this year, when he stepped aside and retained Ray Ginter, Jr. as his trainer. Ginter will give a leg up to hot-riding youngster Jeiron Barbosa Saturday for the sixth time in Double Crown’s last seven outings.

“I’m really excited to have Barbosa on him,” Cash said. “The ride by Barbosa last time, I mean, he just sat there and sat there and sat there and was so patient, so then we saved all the ground and so had just a little fresher horse when it did open up. He had given me about two or three rides like that [earlier in the year], and so this was just kind of the same thing How patient he was to sit there, and luckily they came away just a little bit from the rail and we got to come through.”

If there are no scratches, eight runners will face the starter in the Classic, which is carded as the 11^th race on a 12-race program. Other major contenders include Ournationonparade (3-1), looking to defend his title and win a third Maryland Million race after having previously won the Nursery in 2019; All Threes (7-2), the Ham Smith trainee who has been in the money in eight of nine after returning from a nine-month break; and Market Maven (4-1), who, along with Ournationonparade, gives trainer Jamie Ness a formidable one-two punch.

Cash is looking for his runner to sit a few lengths off the early pace and look to run his rivals down in the lane. And he’s hoping Double Crown will live up to his favoritism.

“I don’t know that we’ve won a race when we’ve been the morning line favorite,” Cash said with a laugh. “I do know that when you when you’re 4-5, a loss hurts a lot more than when you’re 5-1.”