Over the last five years, Graham Motion has trained 16 different fillies and mares to win graded turf stakes and only half as many colts and geldings. For now, that balance has shifted.

Four-year-old gelding Cruise the Nile landed the Henry Clark Stakes last weekend at Laurel Park. He’s unbeaten in four grass races and a winter allowance winner over rising grass star Burnham Square, and he’s not nearly as accomplished as the 4-year-old colt Test Score and the 5-year-old horse One Stripe.

As easy and dominant as Burnham’s Square’s victory Saturday at Keeneland in the Elkhorn Stakes looked, his trainer, Ian Wilkes, firmly believes that was just the start of things.

Burnham Square didn’t make the lead in the Elkhorn, a three-turn, 1 1/2-mile grass race, until he hit the three-sixteenths pole, yet he finished so powerfully that he won by 9 3/4 lengths. Did world-class horses populate the Grade 2 Elkhorn? They did not, but runner-up Desvio won the Sycamore over 1 1/2 miles at Keeneland’s fall meet.

Soleil Volant showed last fall that he’s a stakes horse, while Talbingo is on the fast track to becoming one, but it’s in a second-level allowance, the fifth race Thursday at Keeneland, that those two meet.

Carded for 1 1/8 miles on turf, the Thursday feature drew eight entrants, all of whom carry 118 pounds, and the morning line sets Talbingo the 6-5 favorite.

That number feels too short given the competitive makeup of this field – but since Brian Lynch trains Talbingo, perhaps it falls in the right range.

Pentathlon, winner of both his starts this year, including the Army Mule Stakes at Gulfstream Park on March 28, is on target for the Grade 3, $175,000 Westchester Stakes at Aqueduct on May 3, trainer Shug McGaughey said.

Pentathlon is still in Florida, where on Thursday he worked three furlongs in 36.20 seconds at Payson Park. McGaughey said Pentathlon may have one more work at Payson before shipping to New York at the end of next week.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – The connections of Napoleon Solo know where they want to get this summer with their 3-year-old colt. They’re just not sure what path to take the remainder of the spring.

The Grade 1 Haskell Invitational on July 18 at Monmouth Park is “the early summer goal” for Napoleon Solo, trainer Chad Summers said. His owner, Al Gold, is a New Jersey guy. Cyberknife’s victory in the 2022 edition is arguably his racing highlight.

Letta’s Legacy is an intimidating member of the Oklahoma-bred filly and mare division as a four-time stakes winner who has not lost a main-track sprint since November 2024.

But she will be stepping outside of her comfort zone Tuesday at Will Rogers Downs, when she makes a rare start around two turns in the $50,000 More Than Even Stakes.

The one-mile race is for fillies and mares, 3-year-olds and up, who were bred in Oklahoma. A field of seven is set to start, including two-turn stakes winners Imamidnightspecial and Eireann.

You might think, with months of training since his last start, with blinkers removed, the 3-year-old colt Schwarzenegger stands on the verge of a tactical change. The Palisades Stakes, an age-restricted 5 1/2-furlong turf sprint, teems with speedy front-runners like Schwarzenegger. It might make sense to try something new with a colt who blasted straight to the lead in his three races.

Trainer Wesley Ward fielded such a question, asked if a chance existed that jockey John Velazquez might try to hold his mount off the pace Sunday at Keeneland in the $300,000 Palisades.