Trainer Butch Reid is bringing a small cavalry to Parx Racing for a pair of statebred stakes on Sunday. Ninetyprcentmaddie, a 5-year-old gelding, could lead the charge in the $100,000 Page McKenney, his first start in Pennsylvania-bred company since August.

“Maddie’s doing really well,” Reid said. “We gave him a nice long break this winter and it really did him a lot of good. He’s training very forwardly. This race might be a little under his best distance, but this is a spot we couldn’t pass on.”

A recently departed American faces a tall task Tuesday in the first race of the Royal Ascot meeting, where five other Americans are expected to participate, none trained by Wesley Ward, who blazed an American trail to Royal Ascot and helped create the widespread domestic interest that now greets the annual five-day stand.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – After a productive fall and winter in Tampa followed by a freshening, the well-bred Deuteronomy looks to continue his journey to potential stakes action later this summer when he runs in a second-level allowance that serves as the feature on Aqueduct’s nine-race Sunday card.

Among humans, the relationship between two half-siblings can be complicated.

No such hangups exist among racehorses. But that doesn’t make it any easier for the humans who train them in tandem to pit them against each other, as will be the case when half-sisters Empirical and Fine by Me square off in a $23,000 maiden special weight for fillies and mares ages 3 and up that goes as Sunday’s sixth race at Emerald Downs.

The standard for qualification was well-established when the filly Shiny New started as an odds-on favorite in the 12th and final time trial for the Ed Burke Million Futurity on May 25 at Los Alamitos.

Shiny New needed to run 350 yards in a time faster than 17.88 seconds to qualify for Sunday’s $1,040,000 final.

She did her job.

Shiny New won by 2 1/2 lengths in 17.46 to remain unbeaten in two starts for owners M and G Farms and Steve Burns, who bred the filly.

The formal juvenile sale season in North America comes to a close with the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Co.’s June sale of 2-year-olds in training and horses of racing age, condensed into two sessions on June 17 and 18. Before the lucrative summer racing meets, featuring a number of stakes for the division, kick in, this is the final chance to pick up a juvenile from the first crop of the popular Yaupon at public auction, with that stallion recently recording the winner of a prominent early-season stakes.

When France’s leading trainer, Francis-Henri Graffard, ran Mandanaba in the Poule d’Essai des Pouliches, surely he hoped to win France’s 1000 Guineas. But the Pouliches also served as a means to an end, and that end comes Sunday at Chantilly in the Prix de Diane.

After a disappointing 3-year-old debut in the Grade 2 Eight Belles, Impulse Buy will make her first turf start on Sunday at Laurel Park in the $100,000 Stormy Blues Stakes. The filly will be armed with raw talent against several seasoned turf runners.

“She’s a Speightstown filly and she’s trained on the Polytrack at Keeneland a couple times,” trainer Rodolphe Brisset said. “I think she’s very versatile and fast, so I’m not too worried.”

ARCADIA, Calif. – Nothing symbolizes closing day at Santa Anita like the historic San Juan Capistrano Stakes, and no race scenario is more effective than lone speed.

The circumstances Sunday benefit front-runner Balladeer, who figures to be loose on the lead in the Grade 3 San Juan Capistrano, a 1 3/4-mile turf marathon that is the traditional closing day feature at Santa Anita. Los Alamitos daytime racing begins June 20.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – The once-beaten True Temper returns from an extended layoff as a first-time gelding in Sunday’s Woodbine headliner, a conditioned allowance in which he will experiment on the grass against a hodgepodge of opponents.