Keeneland notes: Juveniles get surprisingly low Beyers for Grade 1 wins

LEXINGTON, Ky. – The relatively low Beyer Speed Figures earned by the winners of the two Grade 1 races for 2-year-olds on opening weekend of the Keeneland fall meet had at least one person involved – trainer Mark Casse – wondering, “How is that possible?”

My Conquestadory, trained by Casse, earned a 74 Beyer figure in an otherwise highly impressive victory in the Oct. 4 Darley Alcibiades, while We Miss Artie, trained by Todd Pletcher, received just a 70 in capturing the Dixiana Breeders’ Futurity the following day after a major rainstorm.

Casse noted that all but the last-place finisher among the seven 2-year-old fillies who ran Oct. 5 in the Grade 1 Frizette Stakes on the Belmont Park main track earned a higher Beyer than My Conquestadory in the Alcibiades.

“I just think it’s implausible that all those horses ran better than My Conquestadory,” Casse said. “I’m very well aware that it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison, but when you look at it logically, I find it hard to believe there are that many 2-year-old fillies faster than My Conquestadory.”

Andrew Beyer, who calculates and publishes the figures for Daily Racing Form , said he went over the Alcibiades very thoroughly before assigning My Conquestadory a 74.

“This was a really straightforward day,” Beyer said. “Sometimes synthetic tracks get a little weird, but in this case, there was a single variant for the whole day. I could be proved wrong later, but my calculations say the Alcibiades was a weak race and probably a weak field. There’s no way I could not accept the figure I came up with.”

Conversely, said Beyer, the rain that pounded Keeneland on Saturday prior to the Breeders’ Futurity made for a very difficult computation.

“God couldn’t have made definitive figures for the Breeders’ Futurity and the Shadwell,” he said with a laugh.

Standing water was visible on the Polytrack surface for the Breeders’ Futurity, a 1 1/16-mile race won by We Miss Artie in 1:46.91. Just 30 minutes later, Silver Max earned a career-high 108 Beyer in running the same distance in 1:42.06 and winning the Shadwell, with runner-up Wise Dan getting a 106.

The Polytrack was harrowed between those two races, a process that churns the water beneath the top few inches of the surface and tends to produce faster times.

“After that huge storm, the track seemed to be changing radically,” Beyer said. “Obviously, [the Breeders’ Futurity] was super slow, and I actually came up with a much lower figure [than 70] for it. I honestly had no idea what it should’ve been. The Silver Max race made a lot more sense, but the track was so changeable that day that it really was hard to arrive at a reliable figure for the 2-year-old race.”

My Conquestadory, We Miss Artie, Silver Max, and Wise Dan all are headed to the Nov. 1-2 Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita.

Lower purses at Churchill

Churchill Downs has released the first of two condition books for its 26-day fall meet, with a noticeable decrease in purse levels for overnight races. As examples, maiden special weight races worth $46,000 at the spring meet will be worth $41,000, with $6,400 in bonuses from the Kentucky Thoroughbred Development Fund, and a first-level allowance worth $48,000 at the spring meet will go for $43,000.

Churchill Downs spokesman Darren Rogers said the decrease was attributable primarily to handle at the September meet failing to “sustain the introductory purses that were offered.”

Purses at the 12-day September meet also were lower than in the spring, but that was mostly because of a lower projected handle due to the newness of the meet.

◗ Doc Almon returned from a layoff of more than seven months and earned a career-high 84 Beyer in posting a mild 7-1 upset in the nominal feature Thursday at Keeneland, a second-level allowance race sprint that marked his third win in a row. Bret Calhoun trains the 3-year-old gelding for Cheyenne Stables. Doc Almon was part of a late pick four that returned a whopping $26,113 on a 50-cent bet. The other winners in the sequence were 18-1, 33-1, and 8-1.

◗ Pablo Morales, easily the leading jockey at the recently concluded Presque Isle Downs meet, notched his first-ever winners at Keeneland this week with Street Sailing, the longest shot in the field in a turf allowance race on Wednesday, and Hokes Hope, a slight favorite in a Polytrack claiming sprint on Thursday. Morales, a 25-year-old native of Lima, Peru, topped the Presque Isle standings with 119 winners.

◗ Chad Masters and Charly Crawford, two of the best-known calf ropers in the world, will be at Keeneland next Friday while in the area for a weekend roping clinic. They plan to visit Wise Dan and the nearby Old Friends Thoroughbred retirement facility.

◗ More than $60,000 was raised for a new community center to benefit the Simunye Project last Sunday night at the poker charity event held at the Castle Post just a few miles west of Keeneland, according to Tommy Walters, one of the event coordinators. More than 300 people turned out, he said.

◗ David McLellan, a Scottish native who worked closely with trainer Eric Reed as an assistant for 15 years, died Thursday after a lengthy struggle with heart disease. He was 63. A memorial service at Reed’s Mercury Equine Center in Lexington was scheduled for Saturday.