Fair Grounds gets off to a waterlogged start

A horse named Wacudposblygowrng won the seventh race Sunday at Fair Grounds, an appropriate coda to the four-day opening week of the 2020-21 season.

Opening day, Thursday, power issues took down track announcer John Dooley’s microphone as well as the regular Fair Grounds simulcast feed graphics package while rendering unusable some high-definition cameras. The resulting product, a shaky shifting picture with no audio, felt like a relic from a different era.

Those issues were resolved by the end of the racing week while the weather only got worse. After fast tracks on Thursday and Friday, the main track was good and sealed throughout the Saturday card and sloppy and sealed during a rain-soaked Sunday card. A Wednesday deluge rendered the turf course unusable during the meet’s first two days and no grass races were run opening week, as 16 races carded for turf wound up being moved to dirt. Turf fields already were overflowing due in part to Churchill Downs’s abrupt cancellation of grass racing earlier this month, and in coming weeks it figures to be a struggle for horsemen to get horses into overfilled Fair Grounds grass races.

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The good news is that the weather looks somewhat better this week; the bad news is another chance of showers Wednesday evening into Thursday afternoon. After so much rain last week it won’t take much to move Thursday’s scheduled turf races to dirt, including the featured sixth. This is a second-level allowance also open to $40,000 claimers restricted to fillies and mares and carded at about 1 1/16 miles.

Trainer Tom Amoss plays the main track-only game as well as anyone in North America and has Figure It Out entered to run only if the race is moved to dirt. Figure It Out, claimed for $62,500 in June, finished second of four in an off-turf one-turn mile allowance race Nov. 18 at Churchill and will rate a solid win chance Thursday if she gets the chance to run.

On turf, In Good Spirits appears the most likely winner, though perhaps at underlaid odds since she’s a 3-year-old facing older rivals for the first time. Her most recent start, rained onto dirt, is a toss, and In Good Spirits ran competitively in three stakes races earlier in her 2020 campaign. She’s also the lone speed Thursday and can control the tempo under Miguel Mena.

Desert Oasis, whose most recent works have come at Belmont Park for trainer Neil Drysdale, has three California starts from earlier this year that fit the spot.

◗ The Steve Asmusen stable produced the Beyer Speed Figure stars of opening week as Nitrous got a meet-best 96 winning the Thanksgiving Classic on Thursday and first-time starting 2-year-old Swiftsure, by Uncle Mo, got an 87 for a maiden sprint win Friday.