Aidan O’Brien is fresh off his eighth training title at Royal Ascot where, with a trio that just oozed class, he won the Prince of Wales with Highland Reel, the Coronation with Winter, and the Commonwealth Cup with Carvaggio. Oh yeah, O’Brien also just won the Irish Derby with Capri, who was “only” his 12th winner in that event.

On Saturday, Belmont Park will have two Grade 1 turf races for 3-year-olds with seven-figure purses in the Belmont Oaks and the Belmont Derby, won last year by the O’Brien-trained Deauville. It’s no surprise those races are on O’Brien’s radar again.

Some of the best racing the game has ever seen has been part of Fourth of July celebrations. Not the Fifth or the Third but smack on the day, when no one went to work and the racetrack was just the ticket.

The death of Better Talk Now this week at age 18 inspired a visit to a corner of racing statistics rarely considered these days. There, amid the dust, cobwebs, and a few loitering insects, was the list of the top 10 money-winning geldings in the history of North American racing.

Before we get to a couple of notes from a summer Saturday that, for whatever reason, found stakes races to be few and far between, first a word on a news note from earlier in the week that caught my attention.

The New York Racing Association announced Wednesday that the purse of the Grade 1 Jockey Club Gold Cup has been reduced to $750,000 from $1 million, with that $250,000 cut essentially reassigned as a purse boost to the Grade 1 Cigar Mile, run later in the fall at Aqueduct and which is now also worth $750,000.

The death of Ivan Puhich this week hit the California horse-racing community right in the heart. Big Ivan was more than an institution. He was the living personification of the game as chronicled by writers like Red Smith, Joe Palmer, and Jim Murray. Puhich embraced the highest highs and lowest lows and knew that most of life was lived somewhere in between.

When the unheralded Mario Gutierrez won the 2012 Kentucky Derby aboard Paul Reddam’s I’ll Have Another, Puhich was at the center of the Cinderella story.

The co-features on Saturday at Santa Anita Park are named for Affirmed and Precisionist, both of them impossible acts to follow.

Ten are entered – five in each race – so cue the chorus always ready to decry smaller average field size as the root of all evil rather than the natural by-product of dwindling foal crops.

In fact, racing departments at beleaguered tracks – which is to say all tracks without casino backing – have become so obsessed with quantity over quality that the delicate compromise between gambling and sport has tipped heavily toward the bottom line.

They all say it. Ask any American racing fan why the Royal Ascot meet is at the top of their bucket list, and the answer comes flying back, “For the racing!”

Nonsense. Americans make the trip because they are besotted with all things British. They love the queen. They envy the accents. They savor the twee delights of tea at 11, cucumber sandwiches, and champagne poured throughout the afternoon. But mostly, they love the dress-up.

Gun Runner probably could have run through a wall of monster trucks down the Churchill Downs stretch Saturday night and still have won the Stephen Foster Handicap by about five lengths, instead of the seven by which he did dominate this Grade 1 event.

Make no mistake, Gun Runner has, with experience and age, developed into a very good horse. The 110 Beyer Figure Gun Runner earned in the Foster was his sixth straight triple-digit Beyer, and third straight of 110 or higher, in starts in this country.

As a native Californian filled with empty regional arrogance derived from accidents of weather and geography, I was appalled at the results of the 2017 Triple Crown.

I mean, New York, wall to wall. Really?

Talk about greedy. New York’s already got Sardi’s and Seventh Avenue, “Hamilton” and the Guggenheim, Cloisters and Lincoln Center. What could it possibly need with another handful of horse-racing doodads? Window dressing at Tiffany?

If I wanted to reach for one word to describe the 2017 Triple Crown season, it would be “inconsistent.”

Always Dreaming, so impressive burning off all the other pace pressure in winning the Kentucky Derby by almost three lengths, finished eighth in the Preakness, beaten 14 lengths.

Cloud Computing, beaten seven lengths when third in the Wood Memorial, came back to upset the Preakness.

Neither came back to compete in Saturday’s Belmont Stakes at Belmont Park.