Flatter: Kentucky Derby prep calendar needs some work

It was not supposed to work out that Coal Battle would have so much attention winning last week’s Grade 2 Rebel. Just like it was not supposed to be so damn cold in a town called Hot Springs.

So it was that our attention was undivided for a postponed Kentucky Derby qualifier, a $1.25 million race that otherwise would have been big-footed Saturday by the early, Middle East throw-down between Forever Young and Romantic Warrior.

Fair odds: DeRosa looks for Kentucky Derby 2025 value.

But wait. There’s more. This week, three win-and-you’re-ins for the Derby are stacked Saturday like airplanes circling to land at O’Hare. The Gotham and the Fountain of Youth and the San Felipe will be run in a two-hour, 25-minute window. Well, maybe 2:30 or 2:31, depending on post-time drag.

Three Derby preps in one afternoon. They will be followed by two more spread out over the next two weeks. Someone put in a call to commissioner Repole and find out what’s up with that.

If there were an embarrassment of riches every week, it would be fine to squeeze so many good races into a single day. But there aren’t. If we had 15 legitimate graded stakes every single week, everyone from horsemen to horseplayers would look like Henry VIII enjoying an endless feast and throwing chicken and rib bones hither and yon.

Instead, it is all about certain Saturdays. And when it comes to big cards, racing, you’re closed on Sunday. You’re my Chick-Fil-A.

I am sure money is the reason there are not more days like we enjoyed with the Rebel card last weekend. It is, we are told, the answer to all our questions.

However, the all-sources handle for Oaklawn on Sunday was $21,053,394. Last year’s Rebel program, on its usual Saturday, pulled in $19,949,116. That gain of more than 5% even beat inflation. The sample size admittedly was tiny, so this would require a deeper dive to find a conclusion.

Allegedly, there were 10,000 fewer people in the stands than there were last year, according to racetrack attendance figures that are about as unaltered as the faces in the crowd at the Oscars. On Sunday.

The jamming of too-often overlapping stakes into a single afternoon comes back to that tired, old refrain about tracks not working with one another and the need for some czar to rule with a golden spreadsheet. In reality, the solution may be much simpler.

All it would take is for one racetrack operator on any given weekend to decide Sunday would work better than Saturday. Or next week better than this week. Just one.

Instead, we find ourselves with copycats trying to emulate the New York Racing Association, which in 2014 started the recent trend of carding a lot of big stakes on one humongous day. It is undeniable that the Belmont Stakes card has become must-see, must-bet. But it has the not-so-tiny flaw of having the Met Mile stuck between the Jaipur and the Manhattan. Traffic and transit on the Grade 1s.

The nation’s most important annual, one-turn mile should be put back on Memorial Day where it belongs. I get that the $125,748,941 total handle for Belmont day at Saratoga was record-setting for a year when a Triple Crown was not in play. But Memorial Day 2024, highlighted by the Wonder Again (G2), pulled in $7,887,978 at Aqueduct. That is a long way from the $16,191,654 the last time the Met Mile card was held on the holiday in 2013 at Belmont Park. Inflation brings that to about $21 million.

But back to the modern reality, especially the road to the Kentucky Derby. This season the schedule called for 36 races on 24 different days. The weather-driven postponement of the Rebel last weekend from Saturday to Sunday added a 25th date.

Arbitrarily picking races out of a railbird’s pork-pie hat, why couldn’t the Breeders’ Futurity (G1) at Keeneland, the Jerome at Aqueduct, the Holy Bull (G3) at Gulfstream Park, the San Felipe (G2) at Santa Anita, the Jeff Ruby Steaks (G3) at Turfway Park, the Arkansas Derby (G1) at Oaklawn and the Blue Grass (G1) at Keeneland slide from Saturday to Sunday?

I can hear it now. That would require the cooperation of six racetracks, and that never will happen all at once. Lather, rinse, repeat. But maybe one at a time. If just one track finds a Saturday to Sunday move yielding success, the copycats may follow. And maybe a pig will sprout wings and catch a gate-to-wire winner.

The idea that the 36 Derby preps could be held on 31 race days instead of 24 has that deceptively simple feel to it. I am pretty sure jockeys who find it rather difficult to be in two places at once would not mind the rescheduling. Would it not be better to have a Prat and a Gaffalione and a couple Ortizes at more races rather than fewer?

Come to think of it, there were no graded stakes on Presidents’ Day. Or Martin Luther King Day. Or New Year’s Day. If Horseshoe Indianapolis could find a way to move its opener up a week-and-a-half last year to coincide with a total eclipse of the sun, it feels like someone would pounce on these open holidays to grab a waiting spotlight that was not being darkened by the moon.

But I digress. We will enjoy the winter harvest of 14 graded stakes Saturday. After a suitable period of hangover Sunday, we will wonder where the banquet went when six or fewer fillies go to the post at Santa Anita for all one of the graded stakes that afternoon.

And next weekend? Well, there is Tampa Bay Downs, as long as the power does not go out on the toteboard.

Oh, wait. Thorpedo Anna will be back at Oaklawn. I guess all is not lost.

Ron Flatter’s column appears Friday mornings at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which also is posted every Friday.