ETOBICOKE, Ontario - Points of Grace concluded a championship campaign here last season with a half-length victory in the $100,000 River Memories over a mile on turf. And while a second straight Sovereign Award in the filly/mare turf category would seem to be beyond her reach, Points of Grace should be a going concern in the River Memories.

Fort Erie racetrack closed its doors for the 2010 season on Tuesday after a 78-day meet that began May 1. The average daily handle from all sources for the 2010 Fort Erie season was $633,100, compared with $721,221 last year, a 12 percent drop. Ontrack wagering on Fort Erie's races increased fractionally, according to the track.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Every fall for 20 years, the one-day California Cup program was among the well-attended highlights of the Oak Tree race meet at Santa Anita.

Times have changed. The California Cup will be held for the 21st time Saturday, and for the first time it will be run somewhere other than Santa Anita.

Oak Tree and the seven-stakes Cal Cup program moved this fall to Hollywood Park, where Cal Cup attendance Saturday is expected to fall short of the 17,885 at the Cal Cup in 2009 at Santa Anita.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – At 12:05 p.m. Thursday – a mere 3,291 days after legislation passed allowing casinos to be built at New York racetracks – the New York Racing Association’ chairman, Steven Duncker, stood in a corner of the first floor of Aqueduct, wearing a hard hat and safety goggles and holding a mallet.

A minute later, Duncker, along with politicians, union workers, and officials from the Malaysian-based company Genting New York, smashed individual square blocks of concrete in a ceremonial groundbreaking of a casino many felt would never be built.

It has been a while since a new face showed up in Chicago from out of state, his connections trying to take advantage of the horse’s Illinois-bred status, but there is just such an entrant in the Bucks Boy Handicap, the last of 10 races and the finale of a six statebred-restricted stakes sequence Saturday at Hawthorne.

ELMONT, N.Y. – When Ramon Dominguez looked at the past performances of Our Khrysty prior to riding her in an overnight stakes at Belmont last month, he was expecting her to run well. That she would win by 4 1/2 lengths without feeling the leather of Dominguez’s whip surpassed the jockey’s expectations.

“She was always consistent, but I wasn’t expecting her to run quite that good,” Dominguez said. “On the bridle, waiting for me ask her, when it opened up she exploded. She was very impressive.”

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Lady Railrider has come a long way since she won her debut in a $2,000 race at Les Bois, a minor racetrack in Idaho, in June 2007.

Three years and 20 starts later, Lady Railrider has emerged as a leading older female California-bred and is the likely favorite to score a repeat win Saturday in the $100,000 Cal Cup Matron at 1 1/16 miles.

The key was continuity.

In the hours after Scoop Vessels died in a plane crash in Oregon on Aug. 11, Vessels Stallion Farm manager Kevin Dickson mourned with Scoop Vessels’s widow, Bonnie. It was more than just an employee-to-family-member situation. Kevin Dickson is Bonnie Vessels’s brother-in-law.

“That night, she looked at me and said, ‘He would want this to go on,’ ” Dickson recalled this week. “I made my vow that I would do the best I can.”

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – The California Cup program will feature three maiden races for the first time this year, after the list of races was redesigned earlier this year to eliminate two starter handicaps and a stakes that had drawn limited support.

Added to the list of races are $40,000 maiden races over six furlongs for 2-year-olds, 2-year-old fillies, and for 3-year-olds and up on turf. Gone are the $50,000 starter sprint, the $50,000 starter handicap on turf, and the $100,000 Distance Handicap for fillies and mares over 1 1/4 miles on turf.

INGLEWOOD, Calif. – Even if the gelding Cost of Freedom has lost a step at age 7, the speedster remains the horse to catch Saturday in the $100,000 California Cup Sprint at Hollywood Park.

And even if 3-year-old Goggles McCoy has never faced older stakes horses, the lightly raced gelding poses the main threat in the six-furlong Sprint, race 1 of 10 on the all-statebred California Cup card on closing weekend of the Oak Tree meet at Hollywood Park.