Steven Crist

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.

  10:25 am: It's a somewhat soggy Super Saturday at Belmont Park, with the main track muddy, the turf courses yielding, four of the day's six grass races moved to the main track, and a forecast for more rain at the beginning and end of the afternoon:

  I'm usually about as cosmopolitan as an International House of Pancakes, but getting back to work this week finds me a relative globetrotter, with a visit to Woodbine this past weekend and a flight to Paris coming up Saturday night a few hours after the Jockey Club Gold Cup.

  2:05 pm: Happy Opening Day at Belmont, where a tricky late pick-4 is made a little trickier by the complicated conditions for the first leg, the 7th race.

12:05 pm: Wake up! First post is 12:30 for Closing Day, where the Hopeful is the headliner, four of the six scheduled grass races have been moved to the sloppy main track, and the two stakes races that remain on the turf have been diminished by scratches.