Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY - MAY 04: Mystik Dan #3, ridden by jockey Brian J. Hernandez Jr. (R), crosses .
.. [+] the finish line ahead of Sierra Leone #2, ridden by jockey Tyler Gaffalione and Forever Young, ridden by jockey Ryusei Sakai to win the 150th running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on May 04, 2024 in Louisville, Kentucky.
(Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images) Getty Images Tomorrow’s $500,000 Jim Dandy at Saratoga is, technically, a Grade 2 prep for the Travers, but this year, with a surprisingly short field of six, it’s a full scale Grade-A gunslingers’ showdown, a splendid thing for the sport in every way. Two of the six runners, or a bit better than 30% of the field, hit the boards in the three Triple Crown races, Sierra Leone in the Derby and the Belmont, and Seize the Grey as the victor in the Preakness. Opposing them, and threatening those two mightily, are the remaining two hotshots in the battle, Fierceness and Batten Down.
Although debate rages around him , Fierceness has been slotted in as the race’s second favorite — although leagues behind top favorite Sierra Leone (at 1-1) . Nevertheless, Fierceness remains a major, dominant and dominating front-running threat to all five other contenders. The latecomer three-year-old Batten Down, who has clocked two breezy consecutive wins recently, one of which was in June’s Ohio Derby, is notably favored slightly over Preakness winner Seize the Grey in the morning line, by virtue of the massive spike in his speed figures triggered by those two victories.
Herewith, the daily refresher of the post positions and odds. (Post Position, Horse, Jockey, Trainer, Morning Line) 1) Sierra Leone, Flavien Prat, Chad C. Brown, 1-1 2) Seize the Grey, Jaime A.
Torres, D. Wayne Lukas, 6-1 3) Batten Down, Junior Alvarado, William I. Mott, 5-1 4) Pony Express, Joel Rosario, John W.
Sadler, 20-1 MORE FOR YOU Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Friday, July 26 Barack And Michelle Obama Endorse Kamala Harris For President New Pixel 9 Pro Details Confirm Google’s Big Design Decision 5) Gould's Gold, Brian Joseph Hernandez, Jr., Kenneth G. McPeek, 15-1 6) Fierceness, John R.
Velazquez, Todd A. Pletcher, 9-5 (Source: NYRA, 7/26/24) Since his disastrous 15th-place showing in the Kentucky Derby, Fierceness has been in remedial bible school under Todd Pletcher, working his way through chapter and verse over the last eleven weeks. The trackside chatter leaves no doubt that, despite his herky-jerky record, good things are expected out of these last weeks.
Put simply, it is hoped that he has calmed down, matured a bit, gained mental focus on his work, and can deliver his characteristically superb athletic performances with more steadiness. function loadConnatixScript(document) { if (!window.cnxel) { window.
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If he holds to his front-running form and brings his best, Fierceness will be challenged right up to the wire by this, and the race in those last two furlongs will be about whether he has gained enough mental stamina in his eleven weeks back in school to defend his lead. If, and it’s somewhat of a big “if,” he survives the early challenges to gain that lead at all. To afford us a picture of this, it’s helpful to imagine the top four favored horses in a four-way contest something like a high-speed four-dimensional chess match: There are a lot of things that can happen or be made to happen in the middle dimensions that can affect the play on either end.
Concretely: Sierra Leone can leave himself with too much to do in the last furlongs, which he’s done in the Derby and in the Belmont; Seize the Grey can be bitten by the Preakness bug again and simply strip the race from the other three major contenders; Batten Down, wholly untested at this Grade 1 Triple-Crown-runner level, can wake up tomorrow morning and decide that he can get out in front and dominate, as he has done on his last two outings. And then, there’s Mr. Completely Unpredictable, Fierceness.
The point here is that — with any one of those three above race narratives playing out, or with all of them playing out at once — Fierceness will have to call upon every mental reserve that his hitherto quite shaky maturity and uneven tactical abilities will afford him to beat them all at the wire. A four-dimensional chess battle is sometimes won by the contender who can muster the athletic creativity in the heat of the moment to do that one thing that he ordinarily doesn’t do. Because of the luxuriously high level of talent in the gate tomorrow afternoon, each of them will have to bring that extra thing.
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