Preview: The Beldame Stakes 2018

Scratching my head? Good way to start! Trying something different: Which is: Riffing rather than writing a race prediction. Clearly, since we usually run these things after the inconvenient fact, this is really something different for the Epitomigm Horse Racing Heuristics Blog. Let's go!

Saturday Oct 6 sees the running of The Beldame G1 Stakes for Fillies and Mares Three Years Old and up at 1 1/8th mile on the Turf and beautiful Belmont Park in less than fetching Elmont, N.Y. We are going to go with Divine Miss Grey (3) on top and across the board for this, guessing that the Danny Gargan trained horse is working well and can carry her speed under Junior Alvarado today. It's a hard race to handicap. The expected favorite would be Wow Cat (6) for Chad Brown, which has run well since coming to this hemisphere. Or Verve's Tale (5), appearing after a brief layoff. Then there's old friend Farrell (8) who fired and bested both Wow's Cat and Verve's Tale (DRF's Mike Beer's top choice) in the Shuvee. I passed on Teresa Z (2) (which together with Wow Cat filled out Beer's slate) although the horse was just  3 lengths off the able Elate in its last out. May the horse be with you! - R.Romeo.

Let's also do an exacta wheel 3 of over 5,6,8.

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WOW CAT GARNERS BELDAME 2018





The results: 6-3-5-2

This proved a fairly dramatic running of the Beldame. Wow Cat showed her mettle with (about) a two-length victory over our choice, Divine Miss Grey. Wow Cat went off at 6/5. Divine was up from the ML of 7-2 to 7-1 as they entered the gate but returned to 7-2 as the gates opened. The early order played to form except that it was Farrell ahead of Come Dancing and the first fraction was mild, and Divine somewhat stalking. along with Wow Cat, which gained the lead on the final turn and never looked back, with Divine and Verve's Tale barely cutting into the lead at closing. We could have emphasized beforehand that Divine Miss Grey had not proved herself at distance (had actually never tried it) - and did not appear to relish the extra going, though she ran pretty well by my estimate. Still scratching my head! - R.Romeo

"Where one seeks, one always finds - when a coincidence is noticed it is overwhelming proof” -- Poincare on prediction.