Mike Watchmaker

If you have been following the run up to the Breeders’ Cup this fall, you would probably agree that there were few surprises at the just completed pre-entry stage. But what surprises there were at the pre-entries, for me, anyway, concerned the first preferences of four of the horses cross-entered in two Breeders’ Cup events.

This will be the 28th Breeders’ Cup, but it will be the first at which the original seven championship events are outnumbered by the newer, “expansion” Breeders’ Cup races. The first “new” Breeders’ Cup race was the Filly & Mare Turf, which debuted in 1999. It was such an immediate and unanimous hit that it made you wonder why it wasn’t part of the inaugural Breeders’ Cup program in 1984.

It’s impossible to take issue with the plan to have a racing official monitor all television and internal track radio broadcasts at this year’s Breeders’ Cup in an effort to prevent another situation like the Life At Ten debacle that took place at last year’s Breeders’ Cup. It certainly can’t do any harm, and it might do some good. It’s sort of like adding another stop sign at a residential intersection that already has two of them. It might actually prevent an accident once every five years or so.

Even after all these years, it never ceases to amaze how a horse can look so special on a number of occasions, and then suddenly pop up with an inexplicably mediocre performance, as Winter Memories did in Saturday’s Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup at Keeneland.

Let’s talk about Super Saturday, Part 2: BELMONT PARK