Weekend GamePlan for Dec. 7, 2019: Picks for Cigar Mile, Demoiselle, and Hong Kong Mile

Nope – “championship racing” doesn’t go into hibernation after the Breeders’ Cup.

The Cigar Mile Handicap, the last of six stakes Saturday at Aqueduct, has Eclipse Award ramifications. Maximum Security already is in the conversation for champion 3-year-old and can end that conversation if he wins the Cigar, but that’s no fait accompli.

The Cigar drew a robust field of 11, and Aqueduct’s important 2-year-old races on Saturday, the Remsen and the Demoiselle, also attracted surprisingly large fields. The Starlet and the Los Alamitos Futurity, not so much, though there’s high-end talent in both those Saturday stakes.

This handicapper traveled to Hong Kong to cover the Hong Kong International Races, so we’ll have to “have a punt,” as they say here, on one of the four Group 1’s at Sha Tin.

Cigar Mile

Sure, it was only the Grade 3 Bold Ruler that Maximum Security won last time, but he had a raft of reasons to lose that race yet drew away decisively the final furlong. But for a poor start in the Pegasus and his Derby disqualification, Maximum Security could be 8 for 8 this year. He’s very good.

Still, he’s the clear-cut favorite while stepping up in class to the Grade 1 Cigar, where he’s been burdened with top weight of 122 pounds. Maximum Security also was unlucky to draw inside key pace rival Spun to Run.

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Spun to Run’s last two Beyer Speed Figures top anything Maximum Security has generated, but surely the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile, run over a demanding surface, took something out of him. I didn’t go to that wedding at 9-1, so I’m sure not attending any 5-2 funerals Saturday.

It’s fair to question whether Looking At Bikinis is a fundamentally “good enough” for the Cigar. At 15-1 on the morning line, I’ll apply the parimutuel method asking that question. Looking At Bikinis raced on a dead rail in the Curlin Stakes and flubbed the start in the Travers, a race where he needed to race on the lead. The 10 furlongs was too far, anyway. His final furlong and gallop-out, admittedly against overmatched foes when cut back to one turn at Keeneland, was very encouraging, as is his work pattern since and the trip he can get Saturday.

Demoiselle

A route-meant 2-year-old winning her sprint debut is not necessarily a good thing. Stepping up to face winners while simultaneously stretching out to two turns is a lot to throw at an inexperienced racehorse, and Alandra’s stretchout came in the Grade 1 Alcibiades. Bumped just after the start, Alandra, who won first out racing from the front and not getting a proper education, was out the back door and racing from the back before she really knew what was happening in the Alcibiades.

While moving up around the turn and into the stretch, she had to wait for racing room, and by the time she found a good rhythm, subsequent Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies winner British Idiom was long gone. Alandra actually traveled as strongly as two who beat her once leveled off the final furlong, and where she had a short Keeneland homestretch last time, she gets 1 1/8 miles, a distance she’s bred to handle, in the Demoiselle. The hope is Alandra can stick closer to the lead Saturday and that her morning-line price holds.

Hong Kong Mile

What if I told you there was a place where transparency was king, where the racing enterprise was geared around the wants and needs of the gambler? Where the horses have identification numbers logged in a database and worn on saddle towels during morning training for easy identification, and that every move out of the public eye – swimming, jogging, vet treatment – was logged and published? Where the stewarding demanded immediate accountability from jockeys for any remotely questionable ride, where timing and course-maintenance technology was state of the art, and where nearly every race went with at least 10 horses?

This is a real place – Hong Kong. The fly in the ointment is the Eastern time zone is 13 hours earlier and races like the four Group 1’s on the Hong Kong International Races card Sunday go off in the middle of the night. Stay up for them if you can!

Beauty Generation is the highest-rated Hong Kong-based horse ever, but after dominating the mile division here for two years, the 7-year-old has lost two straight, lacking his normal punch. He’s still favored to win his third straight Hong Kong Mile; I don’t think he will.

Waikuku is the 4-year-old on the come. He’s beaten Beauty Generation the last two times they met and his recent Sha Tin training race (easily watchable on the Hong Kong Jockey Club website) revealed a horse likely to at least maintain if not improve his form.