As it turned out the track was not that fast, the one turn times (esp. 7f and mile)were helped by a pretty good eight o clock wind, which helped them both on the backstretch and the only turn they ran around. There were some fast horses who ran Saturday, and they ran fast.

The wind did not help the Wood time (once around), hurt the 1 1/4 time a little (through the stretch into the wind an extra 1/8th mile). The day held together nicely, the Wood came up about as I thought (which as it happened was in line with the sprints once you adjusted for wind, though that wouldn't have stopped me if I needed to break it out). I'm not going to give out more numbers from the day or next week's races-- gotta save something for the Derby seminar.

I will say this-- with Ragozin having the NY horses too fast, he's gonna have some kind of fun dealing with this one. If he goes off them, he's got to give the winner even a crazier figure than I gave him. If not, he's got every single horse running in a G1 save one running terrible, way off their tops.

Beyerguy-- yeah, racing secretaries don't make figure maker's lives easy. They used to run a second two turn race on Belmont day, but that was too good an idea, so they stopped a few years back.



TGJB