Worlds collide in route feature

The allowance-slash-optional claiming race. We take these for granted now because they’re so common, but their institution – necessitated by too few horses to fill too many races – created a profound change. The so-called optional claimer essentially merged two pillars of the condition book – allowance races and claiming races – like a new drink combining beer and wine.

It’s especially true in races like the featured seventh race Thursday at Fair Grounds. This is a two-turn dirt race open to first-level allowance runners or $17,500 claimers. These are two different tracks – like prep school versus vocational technology. Horses like Shining Knight live in the first stream. Shining Knight is a homebred campaigned by Prince Khalid Abdullah’s Juddmonte Farms, among the world’s leading breeders and owners. Juddmonte doesn’t do claiming. They develop richly pedigreed animals that either will become stakes starters, broodmares, or someone else’s horses.

Shining Knight, trained by Brad Cox, has sprinted twice, finishing second then first, and stretches out for the first time Thursday. In an earlier era, he’d either be running against horses similarly light on experience or lacking the wherewithal to have cleared the allowance condition.

Enter the claiming option. Drawn on the rail is 8-year-old Aces High, who has made 46 starts and won eight times. He’s not only cleared his first allowance condition, but also his second and his third, and raced competitively in stakes. He’s not in that kind of form now, but he’s still decent, and he clearly holds a deep-level fitness edge over a horse like Shining Knight, to say nothing of all the seasoning gained from being in so many different circumstances.

Fewer miles on the odometer can confer an advantage, too, and handicappers must use that factor and parse the raw ability of a horse like Shining Knight to weight the relative merits among these divergent factions coming together in the very same race.

In the case of the Thursday feature, Shining Knight, owing to his solid form and very popular connections, is going to be a short price despite his specific lack of two-turn experience and lack of racing generally.

For Aces High, post 1 could create issues, and the pick for an upset is another horse in for the tag, Pear Lemonade. Pear Lemonade comes off three races at Hawthorne, where the competition is properly assumed to be lower than Fair Grounds. But in his most recent start, a distant third-place finish, Pear Lemonade ran into a classy Illinois-bred dropper named Goneghost. Sure, a horse like Shining Knight has more upside, but Pear Lemonade offers a better price and has won two allowance races. Twenty years ago, the two would never have met in a race like this.