Meet the new Pegasus, almost the same as the old Pegasus. The race is still at Gulfstream Park for a dozen runners going once around the mile and one-eighth main track. It’s got the obligatory superstar in a swan-song appearance before heading off to stud. There will be opportunities to party hearty, and NBC will be there to call the tune.Then again, Saturday’s event will be very much a 3.0 version of the Pegasus World Cup Invitational. The first running in 2017 was advertised as worth $12 million and the second $16 million, amounts made up primarily of million-dollar entry fees. This time around the PWCI will be worth $9 million, having given birth to the $7 million Pegasus World Cup Turf Invitational for presentation on the same program.That million-dollar buy-in for a Pegasus starting berth was getting a little scary for even the most daring Thoroughbred entrepreneurs. Cutting the fee in half has enabled the presenters to fill the World Cup gate without the arm-twisting and creative financing of the first two runnings, and the field of 10 in the Turf is not a bad response for a race announced only four months ago.Do the numbers add up? Well, for the $500,000 entry fee, first place in the Pegasus dirt race is $4 million, in the turf race $3 million. Compare that to the corresponding Breeders’ Cup races, which require $150,000 in entry fees to win first prize of $3.3 million in the Classic and $100,000 in fees for a shot at $2.2 million in the Turf.If the Pegasus events are all about the money – which is how the advertising leans – the story is also spiced by a sidebar dealing with the diuretic Lasix. Entrants for the World Cup and the World Cup Turf are allowed a seven-pound weight break if their people chose to run without the legal race-day medication.Such a unique condition raises issues of intent, especially since none of the other seven stakes on the Pegasus program offer the same Lasix-free weight break. Is The Stronach Group, owners of Gulfstream Park, making a political statement in favor of efforts to ban all race-day medication in U.S. racing, as currently embodied in federal legislative efforts to place all drug policy in the hands of the United States Anti-Doping Agency? Enabling legislation has been stalled at the committee level and awaits reintroduction in the 116th Congress.Or is the Lasix weight break a marketing tool intended to encourage Pegasus participation by horses coming from jurisdictions where race-day medication is forbidden? The Irish filly Magic Wand and the Japanese mare Aerolithe are entered in the Turf with both a gender allowance of five pounds and the Lasix break of seven.Proponents of a race-day Lasix ban have been urging the U.S. racing community to fall into alignment with international rules. But when it comes to the Lasix issue in practical application, there are nothing but blurred lines. Magic Wand raced on Lasix when she finished fourth in the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf at Churchill Downs last November, while World Cup entrant Kukulkan, the Mexican superstar with the 14-for-14 record, raced on Lasix in his last seven starts in his native land.Trainer Bill Mott and the owners of Turf contender Channel Maker are availing themselves of the seven-pound break by going without Lasix for the first time in the gelding’s 21-race career, which includes six starts in his native Canada. The son of English Channel won the 2018 Joe Hirsch Turf Classic and finished in a dead heat for the win in the Bowling Green.“We weren’t the first to train him, but since he’s been in our barn he’s never shown any indication of significant bleeding,” said Mott, who took over from Dan Vella after Channel Maker’s fifth start. “Since he’s only run on the very minimal dose of Lasix that you can give them anyway, I don’t think it’s a disadvantage for this particular horse. And we thought the seven pounds would be in his favor.”Linking an incentive to go without a legal medication – used by most horsemen as a prophylactic to prevent exercise induced pulmonary hemorrhage – to a reduction in the burden carried in Grade 1 events is, from this viewpoint, skating on thin ice. The suggestion that Lasix is a hop that can be neutralized by carrying less weight seems to leap over a lot of veterinary science to land squarely in a bog of traditional attitudes toward weight and the racehorse.It will be a surprise and perhaps even a concern if either Wayne Lordan or Florent Geroux are able to do the 112 pounds assigned Magic Wand and Aeorlithe in the Pegasus World Cup Turf. Channel Maker carries 117 and the rest – including Yoshida, Catapult, Delta Prince, and Next Shares – pack the full 124, but the weight they concede is only a single variable in a pile of racing uncertainties.For the last word on weight, however, I always turn to the comments of the great Lester Piggott after dismounting from third-place Madam Gay in the 1981 Arlington Million. The 3-year-old English filly was supposed to carry 113 but Piggot did 117. When asked by an unsuspecting TV reporter where he thought Madam Gay would have finished without the overweight, the incomparable Maestro replied:“A lot farther back.”