The Downs at Albuquerque opens its 56-date meet for Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses on Friday night with record stakes purses, a packed stable area, and the Challenge Championships coming in October.

Our Silver Oak, the winner of the $200,351 Snow Chief Stakes for 3-year-old California-breds at Santa Anita last Saturday, will be among approximately 15 horses based at Del Mar this summer with trainer Jonathan Wong.

Wong has been a fixture in Northern California in recent years and will have a small division at Del Mar for the first time this summer. The Del Mar meeting runs July 17 to Sept. 2.

“Usually, I just ship down there and run,” Wong said on Wednesday.

The stakes winners Grecian Fire and Soi Phet are among the expected starters in Saturday’s $100,000 Bertrando Stakes at a mile for California-breds on the opening day of the Los Alamitos meeting.

Grecian Fire won the Grade 3 All-American Stakes at Golden Gate Fields on May 27. Soi Phet, 11, won the Bertrando in 2014 and last year. This is scheduled to be his final start, trainer Leonard Powell said last weekend.

The Evangeline Downs-based trainer Sarah Delany left the beauty shop for the racetrack in 2012 and on Sunday her decision to change career paths reached a pinnacle when Delany won her first stakes race. The Delany-trained Corluna won the $50,000 Lane’s End Danny Shifflett Scholarship Stakes at Lone Star Park.

“For me, it was like winning the Kentucky Derby,” said Delany. “Corluna is very special – I’ve had her since she was a 2-year-old. She’s my dream horse.”

Corluna, a 4-year-old who races for her breeder, Ian Yarnot, was winning her first stakes race, too, Sunday.

Wayne T. Davis will turn 90 on Friday, but the owner’s birthday celebration started in earnest last Saturday night at Evangeline Downs when he won the track’s signature race, the $100,000 Evangeline Mile, for the second year in a row with Mocito Rojo.

“He’s the best one I’ve ever had,” said Davis.

Officials at Keeneland Race Course on Wednesday released the stakes schedule for the 2019 fall meet with minimal change from the status quo. Eighteen stakes, 10 of them Breeders’ Cup Challenge races, will be worth nearly $5.7 million, a record for the Lexington, Ky. track.

The front-loaded meet starts with the three-day FallStars Weekend which includes most of the Breeders’ Cup preps, including five Grade 1 events. The 17-day meet runs Oct. 4-26.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario – Reigning Canadian champion 2-year-old male Avie’s Flatter got the outside post in a field of 14 and was made the 5-2 morning-line favorite for Saturday’s $1 million Queen’s Plate at Woodbine, the opening leg of the Canadian Triple Crown.

Trainer Larry Rivelli has the most horses at Arlington and many of the best horses at Arlington. He tends to dominate maiden racing at the meet, but his recent run of success with first-time-starting maidens has gotten ridiculous.

Escape Clause spent part of April and most of May with trainer Don Schnell’s small string at Canterbury Park, but who knows when – or if – she’ll return?

It’s rare that a trainer wins back-to-back $100,000 stakes on a single racing program – rarer still when that trainer also owns the horses. How about a trainer who owns the horses and bred them? And what if that trainer-owner-breeder had a broodmare band numbering a grand total of three?