The annual rite of summer becoming autumn will commence Saturday when Kentucky Downs opens a four-day meet by featuring the 13th Kentucky Cup turf series.

As usual, the Grade 3, $150,000 Kentucky Cup Turf anchors the meet, which consists of 30 races and runs through Sept. 28. Six races will be run on two Saturdays, when programs are interspersed with action from Turfway Park, while nine races will be run on two stand-alone Monday programs at the turf-only track located adjacent to the Tennessee border near the south-central Kentucky town of Franklin.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. - Richard Dutrow Jr.'s numbers are down this year, but he certainly isn't.

One year removed from enjoying the best season of his training career - as well as being the focal point of everything that was good and bad about Thoroughbred racing - Dutrow, 50, has been out of the spotlight for the majority of 2009. That could be about to change.

Through Tuesday, Dutrow has started only 307 horses this year, with 84 victories. He will most likely finish 2009 with the lowest number of starters and winners in a year since he went 111 for 448 in 2001.

Fresh from a hard-earned victory over the accomplished Euphony in the Lady Canterbury Stakes in Minnesota, the 5-year-old mare Happiness Is was all set to run next in the Sept. 7 Summer Finale Stakes at Mountaineer Park.

But the two-turn race was rained off the grass, leading trainer Tom Proctor to scratch - which now turns out to be just as well. Happiness Is instead goes in the $50,000 Kentucky Cup Ladies Turf, one of the supporting features Saturday, opening day of the abbreviated meet at turf-only Kentucky Downs in Franklin, Ky.

Two horses have tested positive for equine strangles at Hoosier Park, and the other 57 horses stabled in the same barn will now also be tested for the illness.

ETOBICOKE, Ontario - Trainer Danny Vella's first venture in the Woodbine Mile was a last-place finish with All Firmed Up in the inaugural running in 1997.

On Sunday, Vella will be looking to move to the head of the class with Field Commission, who is coming off a second-place finish in the over seven furlongs on turf here Aug. 29.

MIAMI - It probably won't matter to Mr. Green who will be in the starting gate with him for Saturday's $27,000 allowance feature - just so long as Jackson Bend isn't in there, too.

Mr. Green has chased home local division leader Jackson Bend in each of his last three starts, all stakes, but will finally duck his nemesis and should be odds-on to capture the entry-level allowance dash for 2-year-olds at six furlongs.

Three-year-old fillies have beaten older rivals in the last two runnings of the Grade 1, $150,000 Mildred Vessels Memorial Handicap for Quarter Horses, and Alice K White will try to keep the streak going on Saturday night at Los Alamitos. Blue Girls Too won the Vessels in 2007, and in 2008 Stylish Jess Br turned the trick. Alice K White is the only 3-year-old in the 10-horse field.

Ever since - if not before - legal duels with pistols were staged by Sam Houston and others on this parcel of land in the 1800s, contentiousness has been a way of life at what now is known as Kentucky Downs. Like pretty much all racing entities in the state of Kentucky, the track's current financial crunch forebodes a precarious future, owing primarily to the intractability of the ever-pressing issue of alternative gaming.

AUBURN, Wash. - Forener is back in his barn at Emerald Downs, apparently none the worse for wear after a journey across the country and back. Keith Swagerty, his owner, also professes to be fine in the wake of a proposed sale of the horse that fell through under mysterious circumstances.

Burke's Sister will try to continue her winning ways in the $70,000 Richmond at Hoosier Park. Ten Indiana-bred and -sired fillies and mares will go postward.