GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - Speightstown might have won battles on more than just one front Saturday, when he accelerated to a 1 1/4-length win in the $1,060,000 at Lone Star Park. With the victory, he also turned up the heat on Pico Central in the race for champion sprinter for 2004.

The BC Sprint was the final career start for Speightstown, who on Monday was to ship to Kentucky to begin a stud career at WinStar. He exits his racing career as a millionaire and delivered a knockout punch when it might have counted most in the campaign for champion sprinter.

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - As trainer Todd Pletcher found out, you can go home again.

A Dallas native, Pletcher won his first Breeders' Cup race in the first Breeders' Cup race run in the state of Texas when his filly Ashado captured the $2 million on Saturday at Lone Star Park.

Ashado, who saved ground the entire way after breaking from the rail, outran an unlucky Storm Flag Flying to win by 1 1/4 lengths. Stellar Jayne finished a neck farther back in third after uncharacteristically being taken back off the pace following a slow start.

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - Nick Zito knows what's on the line. Everything.

Horse of the Year. Champion 3-year-old colt. Life as we know it. Well, at least two of those three.

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - Put together horses who collectively have won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, Belmont, Travers, Dubai World Cup, Jockey Club Gold Cup, Woodward, Whitney, Pacific Classic, Meadowlands Cup, Stephen Foster Handicap, and last year's Breeders' Cup Classic, and been named Horse of the Year, and what do you have?

The race of the year.

Saturday's $4 million Breeders' Cup Classic at Lone Star Park has drawn an outstanding field, one that could affect championships in four divisions - Horse of the Year, older horse, 3-year-old colt, and older female.

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - There always seems to be an ominous quality to the Turf. As evening shadows begin to dominate the Breeders' Cup landscape and a dizzying procession of earlier races have left the massive crowd exhausted but exhilarated, there comes the inescapable feeling that, incredibly enough, the best is still to come.

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - Nick Zito believes that one day a winner of the Breeders' Cup Juvenile will go on to win the Kentucky Derby. He hopes he's the next trainer to try to accomplish the unprecedented double.

Zito sends out Sun King in Saturday's $1.5 million Breeders' Cup Juvenile at Lone Star Park. Though Sun King has just a maiden win to his credit, he has displayed immense talent in three starts. If he can take another step forward, Sun King may just be able to upset a field that includes four graded stakes winners.

CHICAGO - Wayne Catalano, 48, maybe 5-foot-6, somewhere around 150 pounds, balding, bespectacled, with a cock-of-the-walk bounce in his gait, boarded first-class passage last Friday evening at O'Hare International Airport. He slept on his flight to Kentucky, but if his seatmate had asked the nature of Catalano's business, would his answer have been believed?

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - But for the luck of a coin flip, America's most important horse race on the first Saturday each May might be known as the Kentucky Bunbury, not the Kentucky Derby.

The fateful flip took place in 1779 on the eve of the inaugural English Oaks for 3-year-old fillies. The 12th earl of Derby and his friend Sir Charles Bunbury proposed the idea of holding a male equivalent of the Oaks and agreed to flip a coin to decide whose name the new race should carry.

NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. - Ken Ramsey would like to have you think he just fell off the turnip truck. With his aw-shucks grin and his country-boy act, Ramsey is the antithesis of the so-called modern-day sophisticate whose self-worth is directly linked to living up to whatever image is currently in vogue.

GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas - After nearly beating males in one of the world's most prestigious races, the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, Ouija Board figures to be an overwhelming favorite when she returns against females in Saturday's Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Turf at Lone Star Park.

A field of 12 was entered for the Filly and Mare Turf, which because of the layout of the Lone Star turf course will be run at 1 3/8 miles for the first time since 2000. Ouija Board is also one of six supplemental nominees in the starting lineup, which will swell the total purse to a record $1,410,000.