Honestly, I had not checked. I know now they did. I'll leave that for others to debate, been down that road too many times.

It's an ugly road.

I was going to send him my copy of Beyer on Speed. What am I going to do with it?

I think the last race on the card on Saturday at AQU would have got the exact same field, minus maybe Minescape and Smokin Hero, and possibly plus an extra plodding router or two if it had been carded at 9f instead of 8f.

It's a pet peeve of mine, and probably mine alone, but it's always a little easier to feel confident when you have an extra 2-turn dirt race to work with.

Had the Gazelle not been carded on this day, and with the weather like it was, I think it would have put people trying to gauge the fractions and final time in a trickier spot than they'd ideally want to be in.

I'm sure these are matters that a racing secretary couldn't care less about ... but I was struck by how incredibly rare standalone two turn dirt routes (or stakes run at standalone distances that day even) were on major racing days in the old days.

Even a race like the Belmont Stakes at a rarely run distance of 12f would usually have at least one companion race. They'd run a maiden race at 12f on dirt a lot of times on Belmont Stakes day. I don't know if that was just coincidence or what.

Wasn't that for the network to kind of get an idea of how to film the Belmont itself?

Yes, but it was also almost always the case in the days before TV. Like the Count Fleet, Whirlaway era, etc. When I studied there races ... they carded a cheap race at 12fs on dirt the day of their Belmont.

A couple years, the companion race at 12fs actually was run in faster time than the Belmont Stakes.

1944 for instance, a cheap handicap for Older Males was run in 2:32 flat just one race after Bounding Home won the Belmont Stakes over Pensive in 2:32 1/5

Back in the mid 40s, racing fans didn't know what they were missing. They could've been quarreling over whether the figuremakers broke apart the fig for the cheap handicap just to make Bounding Home's fig 12 pts higher.