Lecomte Stakes

The Lecomte Stakes is a Grade III American Thoroughbred horse race for three-year-old horses at a distance of one and one-sixteenths miles on the dirt run annually in mid-January, at Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans, Louisiana.

[1] Three months later Emerson Francis Woodward and his wife Bessie were killed in an accident with a train at a graded crossing in his home state of Texas.

[7] In 1961 one of Fair Grounds' favorite horses Mrs. Joe W. Brown's Tenacious won the event for the third straight time.

[4] In 1958 Tenacious finished third as the 11/10 favorite to the two time winner Speed Rouser, but would go on and win the New Orleans Handicap.

The 1963 winner City Line won the event defeating Lemon Twist by five lengths and setting a new stakes record of 1:422⁄5.

[8] City Line would go on and repeat his win in his next start defeating Lemon Twist again by eight lengths in the Louisiana Derby.

[9] Mrs. Dorothy Dorsett Brown's two horse entry of Dapper Delegate and Doc Wesley won the event in 1965 starting at the short odds of 1/2.

A major upset occurred in the 1988 running of the event when Thomas Leavell's Pastourelles defeated the heavily backed 3/10 odds-favorite Risen Star by a length and a quarter.

[14] Due to the catastrophic damage caused by of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 the winter meeting was abbreviated and held at Louisiana Downs and the event was not scheduled.