Titles on the line on Freshman Friday

ARCADIA, Calif. – If you’re a fan of 2-year-old racing, TGIF.

For the second straight year, the Breeders’ Cup has cleverly packaged its 2-year-old races on one afternoon, with the five juvenile races on Friday at Santa Anita kicking off a two-day festival that will be keenly watched for both racing and safety.

The five Breeders’ Cup races on Friday are 5 through 9 on a 10-race card that begins at 10:45 a.m. Pacific. There are full fields of 14 in the three grass races – the Turf Sprint, Juvenile Turf, and Juvenile Fillies Turf – and divisional titles are likely to be decided in the two dirt races, the Juvenile Fillies and Juvenile.

The Juvenile Fillies, race 7, includes Grade 1 winners Bast, British Idiom, Perfect Alibi, and Wicked Whisper, and the talented, but lightly raced, Donna Veloce. If any of them win, that filly will get the division’s Eclipse Award.

Similarly, the Juvenile features a showdown between highly rated colts Dennis’ Moment and Eight Rings, the two current front-runners for that division’s title. Shoplifted, who will try to pull off an upset in the Juvenile, had an easy tune-up Wednesday morning, when he worked three furlongs. Daily Racing Form’s Mike Welsch gave him a time of 38.53 seconds.

There are nine more Breeders’ Cup races on Saturday, all for older horses, concluding with the richest of them all, the $6 million Classic.

Total purses for the Breeders’ Cup races are $28 million. Total handle for the races should be more than $150 million. With runners from across the country and around the globe, it can be a celebration of the best racing has to offer.

But make no mistake, this 36th Breeders’ Cup is one of the most pivotal in the event’s existence, owing to it being held at Santa Anita. This track has been so popular with Breeders’ Cup executives that some board members lobbied not too long ago to make it the permanent home of the event, an idea that did not gain enough support.

Now, Santa Anita finds itself garnering attention for its spring meeting earlier this year that included a rash of fatalities, particularly during and immediately after wet weather. Subsequent fatalities at the current meeting have put the track, and the sport itself, under an unprecedented level of scrutiny.

On Wednesday the Breeders’ Cup played host to a safety and security briefing at Santa Anita, with press invited to hear from Breeders’ Cup executives, as well as veterinarians, and track surface experts on topics like drug-testing protocols, medication restrictions, veterinary care and oversight, and monitoring of the surfaces on which the athletes compete. At the briefing, Breeders’ Cup officials said 30 veterinarians would be working at this year’s event.

Those who attend this Breeders' Cup will be treated to seeing world-class horses and jockeys compete in one of the iconic settings in all of sports, let alone racing. Santa Anita is a jewel, with an Art Deco-style grandstand built in the 1930s, and a view from those stands of the majestic San Gabriel Mountains. On its best days, it’s an absolutely breathtaking scene.

With the stakes high, the hope is that Friday and Saturday are two of those best days.