Steven Crist

Here are the final fields that were drawn today for the 15 Breeders' Cup races, followed by some leaderboards and fun facts regarding the records and origins of the 180 final entrants, who have combined to win 788 of 2,122 career starts and earn $113.2 million.

Here's the first version of Breeders' Cup Cheat Sheet I'll be updating over the next 10 days, providing an at-a-glance summary of the fields for the 15 races at Churchill Downs Nov. 4 and 5.

If Havre de Grace or Tizway wins the Breeders’ Cup Classic in 13 days, either would be an obvious and worthy choice as America’s Horse of the Year. If both lose, it gets a lot more complicated.

Much as I hate to pass up any double-carryover in New York, I just couldn't make heads or tails of today's sequence at Belmont Park. So I'll just kibbitz it while quietly kind of rooting for a triple-carryover into Friday. (Kibbitz, a useful verb of Yiddish/German derivation, means to issue unwelcome or meddlesome comments, especially during a game that the kibbitzer is not actually playing. The term allegedly arose from the chess cafes of central Europe at the start of the 20th century.)

BOULOGNE-BILLANCOURT -- Greetings from Paris -- France, not Kentucky -- where I didn’t make it to the Arc on Sunday, but made the double at Auteuil Tuesday.