All Hail The Queen!

Leona Helmsley was known as the Queen of Mean.  Martha Stewart is the Queen of Clean (who’d be Queen of Mean herself if she wasn’t already cryogenically frozen).  But who really was Queen of Green? 

Well, she was a stakes-winning mare whose expertise lay in marathons on the grass.  She liked routes, and she could run all day and night if she wanted to during a successful career.  She’s now the dam of four with a very active lifestyle, and she’s the subject matter behind the $55,000 Queen Of Green Stakes in Maine this weekend.  Here’s the field of four contenders to the throne:

In Dee Creek [A.P. Indy-Coon Creek, by Danzig] is 8/5, but she’s second choice among the quartet for the barn of tarski.  Her pedigree doesn’t have too much in it to suggest she might be a feasible choice on grass—her dam was a stakes winner on dirt—and her background also seems to fall flat on turf form, considering this is only her second start on the lawn.  Her one previous try was a fading third in a MSW, where her fig ended up being a 72.  This time around, she has three allowance wins under her belt, and a few stakes tries which have found her a bit in over her head.  Her dirt form is alright, it must be said, with her numbers hovering around the century mark and her preferred running style of sitting chilly off the lead yielding some solid results at these middle distances.  It is only a field of four, but it’s a bit difficult to tell if she’d recapture her earlier dirt form in his first grass start since January 15.  Still, this isn’t exactly the hardest competition you might find.

Sierra Nevada [Tale Of The Cat x Louis Quatorze] represents 40oz, and contrary to In Dee Creek, she’s had every start of hers on the grass since January 10, 2004.  She has eight stakes wins, including a Grade III, and has picked up a paycheck in all but two starts.  She might not be a player on the main stage of the turf distaff division, but she’s had an incredibly consistent ride going for her.  Her numbers remain high, regularly hovering around the century mark and peaking with a 116 she earned in winning the Grade III Cootie’s Sprint at Ascot in her 2005 debut.  And she’s versatile, staying on the lead or coming from behind in most of her efforts.  Here, there might not be much speed for her to stalk, so she may just find herself on the front end by default.  She holds some back class over the field here, but this bunch appears to be unpredictable.

Eager Prospector [Chief Prospect x Legal Prospector] has won four times this year for trainer acarigua3, but those wins have mostly been in claiming and allowance races.  She has started for a tag as low as $5K this year…but then again, she’s also cleared her NW3x allowance condition four back.  Her numbers have begun to move upwards, into the high-80s to the low-90s, but they do fall short of the other three fillies at their best.  Expect her to do her best running from off the pace, but she’ll need to raise her game substantially to ascend to the throne here.

Affirmed Thief [Cat Thief x Affirmed] races under the silks of pazthree, and her numbers haven’t cracked the century mark, either, but she romped in a Florida stakes last out stalking a slow, procession-like pace at a mile-and-three-sixteenths.  The race was an aberration, but not in the way one might think.  She won stalking a funereal pace (which hasn’t been her most favorite style of attack) at a distance that hasn’t gotten many wins for her, and earned a lower speed figure than she’s earned since June.  Usually, she likes to be further off the pace, at middle distances, and her recent figs have been solidly in the mid-90s.  While she’s still eligible for a fourth-level allowance race, she’s picked a pretty good spot, much like her last, to try and pick off a tiny field for a good-sized purse.  One expects that she might try and let someone else pursue a leadership role while keeping a rein on the assumed leader to make sure that one maintains a sensible pace.  The race shapes up a lot more like her earlier stakes efforts, but the concern does remain that maybe she just would prefer another sixteenth of a mile.

My selections:

Queen: Sierra Nevada

First Runner-Up: Affirmed Thief

Second Runner-Up: In Dee Creek

Third Runner-Up: Eager Prospector

Good luck, happy racing, and God save the Queen.