Finger Lakes Gaming and Racetrack will present the same 17 stakes in 2007 that it offered a year ago. The order of the events, however, has been altered in an attempt to give more late-developing 2-year-olds a chance to run for added money.

The $200,000 New York Breeders' Futurity, the track's premier race for juveniles, has been pushed back a month from Labor Day weekend to Oct. 6.

The season's first two stakes for 2-year-olds, the Aspirant and the Lady Finger, each worth $100,000, will be run about three weeks later than usual, on Sept. 3 rather than mid-August.

NEW ORLEANS - Michael McCarthy has been a head trainer for less than two months, and already has won a pair of graded stakes races in California with Friendly Island and Ravel.

ARCADIA, Calif. - A.P. Xcellent will be loose on the lead in the seventh-race feature Thursday at Santa Anita. The scenario does not ensure victory for A.P. Xcellent, but it makes him look awfully tempting in the 1 1/2-mile turf race.

ARCADIA, Calif. - There are reasons not to like Romance Is Diane when she runs Saturday in the Grade 1 Las Virgenes Stakes at Santa Anita - her dirt races are slow; her only reasonably fast race was on Cushion Track.

So is Romance Is Diane a good filly or is she just lucky? Three straight wins will not satisfy skeptics, and why should they? Romance Is Diane earned ordinary Beyer Figures of 72 and 73 in a maiden race and the California Cup Juvenile Fillies, then improved to 85 when she switched to Cushion Track and won the Grade 1 Hollywood Starlet.

ALBANY, Calif. - Three young men - jockeys Joel Rosario and Luis Contreras, and their agent, Ramon Silva - are making a big splash at Golden Gate Fields.

Rosario, a 22-year-old rider from the Dominican Republic, arrived in northern California in November and finished ninth in the Bay Meadows jockey standings during the fall meet. He is currently second at Golden Gate Fields with 26 victories, six ahead of third-place rider Jason Lumpkins. Russell Baze, who is expected to return to action Thursday after sustaining a cracked rib on Jan. 28, leads with 41 victories.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. - If the last three legs of Thursday's late pick four at Aqueduct summon a sense of deja vu, it's because you have seen them before. A restricted claiming sprint carded as Thursday's ninth race was supposed to be race 6 last Saturday; and Thursday's two events that contain first-level allowance conditions, races 7 and 8, were originally races 5 and 6 last Sunday.

It would be unwise, however, to merely skim over the familiar-looking fields and arrive at the same handicapping conclusions.

NEW ORLEANS - It's 9:15 on Monday morning at Fair Grounds, and the Steve Asmussen barn radiated all the tranquility of a midtown Manhattan rush hour. Horses being removed from automated walking machines, baths given, blood samples taken, exercise riders reporting back after routine gallops - 20 people going 30 directions, most with some piece of information to convey.

Typical day.

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. - After a one-week hiatus from racing brought about by a winter blast, Oaklawn springs back into action on Thursday with sprinters Smoke Smoke Smoke, Monkey Hill, Urban Guy, and Marq French matching speed in the featured eighth race. The $80,000 optional claimer will be run at six furlongs, and is part of a pick six that has a carryover of $60,007.

OZONE PARK, N.Y. - Johannesburg Star, the beaten favorite in the Count Fleet Stakes, was shipped from Aqueduct to south Florida over the weekend and will be pointed to the Grade 2, $350,000 Fountain of Youth Stakes on March 3 at Gulfstream Park. Johannesburg Star had been pointing to Saturday's Whirlaway Stakes here.

Horsemen and officials at Turfway Park said Monday that they are closely monitoring the Polytrack surface at the Florence, Ky., track, where more equine injuries apparently have occurred this winter than during the same time frame last year.