Thursday TimeformUS Highlight Horse: Beautiful Karen can rebound after freshening

Belmont at the Big A | Race 4 | Post Time 2:35 p.m. (ET)

She’s Awesome (#1) looks pretty formidable at first glance. She’s won four of her last eight starts, with three seconds and a third. Much of that success has come since she was claimed by Linda Rice, for whom she ran well at the starter allowance level over the winter. Following her January starter victory, she got a couple of months off and was subsequently dropped in for a $25k tag. The drop seemed a little suspicious, but the alternative of trying an N1X allowance race might have been too ambitious. She won that race, but her claim was voided by the vet. Therefore, she’s still with Linda, who drops her again to this $20k level. As with the prior drop, it’s not out of character for Rice to make this move with a horse that has already paid for itself.

In my view, the bigger issue with She’s Awesome is the rail draw. She has gotten outside stalking trips from wide posts in her recent starts, and she didn’t appear to appreciate kickback when she encountered it last November. She’s probably going to get outrun from the inside this time, and I wonder if she’ll be as effective with a different trip.

I also have serious concerns about her main rival Mongolian Panther (#3). This 8-year-old mare’s best form for Jacobson has slowly been slipping away over the past few months, and her last race is a problem for me. She had trouble keeping up early at a slower pace going a mile when she had possessed better tactical speed in the past. Now she’s finally dropping down into a claiming event, and I usually find these types of drops are a negative for Jacobson.



My top pick is Beautiful Karen (#8), even though her recent form looks worse than that of the two favorites. Yet I would argue that her last race isn’t nearly as bad as it seems. That was a pretty quick pace going seven furlongs over a dull and tiring track, and she did well to hang on for third behind the improved Solib. The horse who was chasing her early, Liberty Flame, faded to fifth and came back to win her next start by over seven lengths. Beautiful Karen has had some time off since then and I like that there’s no significant dropdown in her return, especially since Rudy has run her for cheaper claiming tags in the past. She’s drawn outside of all the other speed and will be tough for this field to handle if she can rebound to one of her better efforts. Her winning 97 TimeformUS Speed Figure from three starts ago is higher than any of the recent numbers achieved by favorite She’s Awesome.