Brown has three for Diana

ELMONT, N.Y. – With Mother Nature forcing the postponement of turf workouts at Belmont Park from Sunday to Monday, trainers had to call an audible in preparing their horses for upcoming stakes.

Chad Brown had to move 10 works from Sunday to Monday, including by the Grade 1-winning duo of A Raving Beauty and Sistercharlie, who will head the field for Saturday’s Grade 1 Diana Stakes at Saratoga. Brown is expected to enter three in the Diana when entries for Saturday’s card are taken Wednesday.

As they’ve seemingly done week after week for the last month or so, A Raving Beauty and Sistercharlie worked together, with neither giving an inch through a half-mile drill in 49.43 seconds. They went perhaps a furlong shorter than they might have had they worked Sunday, but it was still another solid move for the pair.

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Brown, who has won the last two runnings of the Diana, also plans to run New Money Honey in the race Saturday. She has been training at Saratoga for most of the summer and last Saturday worked a half-mile in 49.80 over the Saratoga main track.

Brown had seven nominated to the Diana, but has other plans for some of those runners. Fourstar Crook, who beat Sistercharlie in the New York Stakes, will likely run in the Grade 1 Beverly D. on Aug. 11 at Arlington. Brown said that Fourstar Crook missed a workout last week after kicking a stall wall and bruising a foot. She did work Monday, going a half-mile in 49.57 seconds over the Belmont turf in company with Off Limits.

Off Limits, winless in three starts this year after closing out last year with a win in the Grade 1 Matriarch at Del Mar, is likely to wait for the Grade 2, $400,000 Ballston Spa on Aug. 25 at Saratoga.

Quidura, runner-up to Lady Eli in last year’s Diana when in the barn of Graham Motion, was beaten a neck by stablemate Fifty Five in a Sunday allowance at Belmont in her first start for Brown and first start since last October.

“She didn’t like the soft ground yesterday and she did get a little worked up in the paddock, which kind of caught us off guard,” Brown said Monday at Saratoga. “So we’ve got a couple of things we can work on.”

Fifty Five is likely to make her next start in the Yaddo Stakes for New York-breds on Aug. 24, Brown said.

Others expected to run in the Diana include Proctor’s Ledge, winner of both the Lake George and Lake Placid in Saratoga last summer, and Hawksmoor, who on Monday worked five furlongs in 1:02 over the Tapeta surface at Fair Hill, a training center in Maryland.

– additional reporting by Mike Welsch