Handle at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Ark., is up 5 percent at the halfway point of the meet, which has led officials to make across-the-board increases to overnight purses. The track was to raise maiden special weight and allowance races $1,000 each beginning Friday, while all claiming races will be boosted in value by $300.

OLDSMAR, Fla. - Trainer Will Phipps is enjoying his occasional trips to Tampa Bay Downs this meet. The trainer has sent out four runners at the current stand and the result has been four winners.

Phipps will attempt to keep his perfect record intact on Saturday in the $65,000 Challenger Stakes when he tightens the girth on Fierce Wind, a fast and talented runner who will be making his second start for Phipps since coming back from a long rehabilitation period.

STICKNEY, Ill. - For most parties involved, opening day of the spring meet at Hawthorne Race Course was to come Friday. But Inez Karlsson will have to wait.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. - Finishing fifth never felt so good to jockey Anna Napravnik.

That's where Napravnik finished aboard Boss Tiffany in Thursday's second race at Aqueduct. But the fact that Napravnik was riding at all was pretty miraculous considering her involvement in an ugly five-horse spill here the previous day.

Napravnik, who broke her back in 2007, landed on her back again in the spill, but sustained no significant injuries. She took off her remaining three mounts on Wednesday and did go to the hospital for precautionary X-rays, which were negative.

ARCADIA, Calif. - Tres Borrachos, winner of the Grade 2 Swaps Stakes last summer, has been invited to the $1 million Godolphin Mile in Dubai on March 28. Trainer Beau Greely has yet to pack his suitcase.

Greely wants to see Tres Borrachos finish first or second in an optional claimer over 1o1/16 miles on Saturday at Santa Anita before making any definitive plans for later this month.

"We thought ideally this race is a spot to get confidence in him," Greely said. "I'd like him to win, to see him run a good race. If he were to run one-two, we'd head on over."

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. - Trainer Allen Jerkens already has two Gulfstream Park Handicap trophies on his mantelpiece. He will look to add to that collection next Saturday when his speedy but relatively inexperienced Formidable makes his stakes debut in the Grade 2 Gulfstream Handicap, which has been shortened to a mile for the first time.

CHICAGO - Arlington Park's Mid-America Triple finally will be bound by more than just a name, with the suburban Chicago racecourse offering a $500,000 bonus to the owner of a horse who sweeps the three-race series of 3-year-old grass stakes this summer.

Go back one year, and you'll find Steve Asmussen in the midst of an epic Fair Grounds meet. Asmussen won far more stakes races than any trainer previously had in one Fair Grounds season, and he accumulated a whopping 86 wins by meet's end.

Quietly, Asmussen has been at it again this year, racking up huge numbers despite running well behind his 2007-08 totals during the first half of this Fair Grounds season. While his stakes wins are down, Asmussen had won 71 races through Sunday, and that with 15 race days left in the ongoing meet.

Paul Jones, who was voted champion trainer last year by the American Quarter Horse Association, will have a division at Remington Park for the first time when the track opens for a 50-date Quarter Horse meet Friday. Purses for the season, which will run through May 31, are projected at a record $230,000 a day. Highlights of the stakes schedule include the $1 million-estimated Heritage Place Quarter Horse Futurity on closing night.

ARCADIA, Calif. - What was once commonplace has become a rarity. Owner John Toffan and trainer Paco Gonzalez will be after their first graded stakes win in nearly seven years when Burg Berg starts in Saturday's $300,000 Santa Anita Oaks at Santa Anita.

Toffan, along with his late partner Trudy McCaffery and Gonzalez, were fixtures at the top of racing in the 1990s and earlier this decade, racing such major stakes winners as Bien Bien, Bienamado, Came Home, Del Mar Dennis, and Free House.