The 10-race program that started during a brief rain storm before playing out in sunshine, did not deliver the expected storybook type of result in the featured GIII Schuylerville S., though. Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas, absent from America's oldest track for two seasons, watched Summer Promise (Uncle Mo), the 6-5 favorite, finish second to Just Cindy (Justify) in the six-furlong stake for 2-year-old fillies.

The New York Racing Association announced its paid attendance at 28,466 and the all-sources handle at $21,764,922. In 2021, the attendance was 27,760 and the handle was $21,935,534.

Lukas, 86, and his wife Laurie watched the replay several times in their clubhouse box after Summer Promise ended up 2 1/4 lengths behind the Clarkland Farm homebred.

“I didn't think that the bump at the middle of the stretch helped,” Lukas said. “But I don't think it affected us all that much. I think that she was just a little bit short. I think she needed the race. I was surprised because I trained on her pretty good. But this is a new surface, a deeper surface and I think that she needed to maybe be tighter.”

Wearing a big, white cowboy hat and aviator glasses as he sought his first Saratoga graded stakes win since Sporting Chance's (Tiznow) score in the 2017 GI Hopeful S., Lukas said the well-bred BC Stables filly just wasn't up to the challenge in her second career start and first venture into stakes company. Lukas said he was eyeing the Schuylerville even before she won her debut by five lengths on June 25 at Churchill Downs.

Lukas will be back in stakes company July 23 when his GI Kentucky Oaks winner Secret Oath (Arrogate) returns to competition in the GI Coaching Club American Oaks.

Two races before the 104th Schuylerville, named for a small town east of Saratoga Springs, favored Tarabi (First Samurai), trained by Cherie DeVaux, won the inaugural running of the Wilton. The Wilton for 3-year-old fillies was significant and drew a fair amount of attention because it was the first mile dirt race run at the track in 30 years and the first out of a chute in 50 years.

NYRA officials decided during the winter to rebuild the Wilson Chute, which was in use from 1902 through 1972. It was torn down to make room for parking. In 1992, NYRA ran 25 mile races from a starting gate on the first turn. That experiment was scuttled after the one season because of complaints that horses starting from inner post positions had an unfair advantage.

Starting from post six in the field of seven under Javier Castellano, Tarabi sat just off the pace, took the lead inside the three-sixteenths pole and prevailed by three-quarters of a length in 1:38.53.

Trainer Todd Pletcher, who saddled the runner-up Goddess of Fire (Mineshaft) and two others in the field, had no complaints.

“I thought the race went smoothly,” he said. “The fractions seemed a little slow. I wonder how accurate the time was. It seemed kind of slow for these type of fillies to be going that slow. As far as the race, the way it unfolded, it looked like a pretty fair race.”

The addition of the chute enables NYRA to schedule dirt races as a distance between seven furlongs and 1 1/8 miles and run one-mile turf races moved to the main track at the same distance.

“Mile and an eighth races, we've had a lot of success there,” Pletcher said. “I'm not going to judge it so soon. I didn't see a huge need for it, but maybe it will turn out to be a good thing. We'll see.”

During and after the fifth race, “Bones” Lafaro of Milton, NY, a small town in the Hudson Valley near Poughkeepsie, was the ringleader of a raucous crowd of approximately 50 friends and relatives who saluted their late friend, Freddy Butwell, with the Freddy B. Memorial Race.

“Me and Freddie were elementary school friends. High school friends. We grew up together and played basketball and other sports together,” Lofaro said. “Freddie passed away from complications of COVID this past year. He would always invite me to the track when he had a place up here. For the last six, seven years I'd come up. He loved to be here. I thought it was just a great way to repay him. His wife was here today. We had a great time. This is a great experience. He loved Saratoga.”

As an added bonus, Lofaro said that Butwell was a friend of a co-breeder of the winning horse, the favorite Majority Partner (Unified), trained by Jeremiah Englehart. Majority Partner paid $5.60 to win and the way the Freddy B. Memorial Race crew celebrated, it was clear that many of them had tickets on the winner.

Lofaro said that he and Butwell often came to Saratoga for opening days and that it was especially nice that the memorial race was held on the first day of the season.

Though he acknowledged being disappointed with the outcome of the Schuylerville, Lukas said he enjoyed being back at Saratoga with a big, loud crowd.

“It was wonderful,” he said. “Racing needs this enthusiasm and excitement and it only happens here. Keeneland, here and Del Mar are the racetracks where you get some kind of atmosphere. It felt like the old times.”

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Off as the 6-5 chalk, the $240,000 Keeneland September graduate was content to lay second through the early exchanges as Angitude (Violence), a bit reticent to load, showed the way in her first attempt at a distance of ground. Tarabi began to zero in on the front-runner as the field approached the stretch, grabbed that one with about a furlong to travel and prevailed by three-quarters of a length. Goddess of Fire (Mineshaft) finished with interest at the rail to complete a chalky exacta ahead of Angitude in third.

A full-sister to Shivaji, a Group 3-winning and Group 1-placed turf sprinter and $2.1-million earner on the ultra-competitive Japan Racing Association circuit, Tarabi earned a lofty 79 Beyer in decimating a group of Ellis Park maidens at first asking last August, then ran into 'TDN Rising Star' and eventual champion Echo Zulu (Gun Runner) in her next two, finishing runner-up in this track's GI Spinaway S. and again in the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies. The chestnut tuned up for this return to stakes company with a sound runner-up effort in a seven-furlong allowance over the Churchill main track June 18.

A 35th black-type winner for Claiborne's underrated First Samurai, Tarabi is out of an unraced daughter of Grade II winner Buy the Barrel, also the dam of MSP Stave (Ghostzapper) and English MGSP Mise En Rose (War Front). The winner's 2-year-old half-brother Gunner Bay (Gun Runner) was purchased by Robert and Lawana Low for $250,000 out of last year's Keeneland September Sale, and Indian Bay is also responsible for a yearling Kantharos filly. The mare was most recently covered by Authentic.

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The 40-day season at historic Saratoga Race Course launches Thursday and runs through Labor Day, Sept. 5. It will be the 77th consecutive year of competition at Saratoga–since the closing for three years during World War II–which coincidentally makes it the second half of the very long run since the first meet was held in 1863. During the eight-plus weeks of racing, 77 stakes worth $22.6 million in purse money will be contested.

In 2020, the Saratoga season was conducted without fans to comply with COVID-19 protocols in place at the time. With fans back on the grounds last summer, the meet was a smashing financial success. Even though 45 races were moved off the turf due to wet conditions, Saratoga had a record all-sources handle of $815,508,063. Luis Saez was the leading rider for the first time and Chad Brown won his fourth training title.

Lukas, 86, was stabled at Saratoga for 36 consecutive years, but missed the last two seasons due to a combination of the pandemic and a drop in quality of his long-powerful stable.

After his 3-year-old filly Secret Oath (Arrogate) won the GI Longines Kentucky Oaks and finished fourth in the GI Preakness S., he talked about shipping her to Saratoga for the GI Coaching Club American Oaks and the GI Alabama S. Instead, the typically enthusiastic Hall of Famer brought a crew of runners from Kentucky and is back at his longtime Saratoga base, Barn 83, on the northeast corner of the Oklahoma training track stable area.

“We're a little bit deeper than that one horse,” Lukas said. “That's one of the reasons. You cannot survive here financially if you don't have a couple of horses that are competitive. If you try to come up here with one horse, this place is just right under the national debt as far as expenses. We've got a little depth. We've got a couple of 2-year-old fillies that have already exposed themselves and can run and we've got a couple of colts that we think can run. So, we brought 16 head trying to think that we were somewhat competitive. The racing here is good but it's not overwhelming. It's awful good in Kentucky right now, too.”

Lukas debuted at Saratoga in 1984 and made an immediate impact, finishing 1-2 in the Alabama with Life's Magic (Cox's Ridge) and Lucky Lucky Lucky (Chieftain) and won the GI Spinaway S. with Tiltalating (Tilt Up). He has won at least one race every year at Saratoga, is a six-time training champ and has 254 victories, 60 in stakes. Three of those stakes wins came in Saratoga's signature race, the GI Runhappy Travers S. He could have his 21st Travers runner on Aug. 27, Ethereal Road (Quality Road), who is headed to the GII Jim Dandy S. on July 31.

Briland Farm's Secret Oath will have her final work for the $500,000 July 23 GI CCA Oaks on Friday or Saturday.

Lukas suggested using capital letters for his comments on how the filly is doing a week out from the race.

“Very, very good,” he said. “Very good.”

Lukas will saddle BC Stables's 'TDN Rising Star' Summer Promise (Uncle Mo) in the GIII Schuylerville S. for 2-year-old fillies on Thursday. He has won the six-furlong opening day feature six times and sits in a tie with his former assistant and fellow Hall of Famer Todd Pletcher. Summer Promise, a $500,000 yearling purchase, won her debut by five lengths June 25 at Churchill Downs. His most-recent win in the Schuylerville was in 2004 with Classic Elegance (Carson City).

This will be the eighth summer that the Fitch brothers, Patrick, Jason and Adam, have operated King's Tavern on Union Avenue, across from the main entrance to the track. They leased a drab seasonal bar and turned into a busy year-round venue that is popular with track fans. They managed to get through the difficult first pandemic year in 2020 and had a solid 2021.

“We're looking at this meet and the only real concern we have is the weather,” Jason Fitch said. “If we can, let's get some sunny days and have the rainy days be on Monday and Tuesday. We're hoping that it's smooth sailing and the buzz has been–even throughout the hard winter with foot snow storms–that people are coming out.

“People just want to be out of the house. That whole post-COVID-locked-up-let-me-be-free vibe is still going on.  I think this is going to be our busiest Spa meet yet. Hands down, I think it's going to be the busiest one.”

In January, NYRA announced plans to rebuild the Wilson Chute, which would bring back one-mile dirt racing back to Saratoga. The chute, which runs parallel to Nelson Avenue, provides jockeys and horses a straight run before entering the main track on the first turn. The original Wilson Chute was first used in 1902 after the track, which opened in 1864, was reconfigured and expanded from one mile to 1 1/8 miles by the new ownership group headed by William C. Whitney. It was named for Richard T. Wilson, Jr., a prominent horseman and partner in Whitney's group. Wilson, a three-time winner of the Travers, served 20 years as the president of the Saratoga Association and was instrumental in rebuilding the clubhouse and Turf Terrace, which opened in 1928. The chute was closed after the 1972 season and the space it occupied used for parking.

With the Wilson Chute gone, NYRA could not card dirt races at distances between seven furlongs and 1 1/8 miles. It was also an issue when one-mile turf races had to be moved off the grass and run at either seven furlongs or nine furlongs.

In 1992, NYRA experimented with one-mile races, ran 25 of them during the season, then scrapped the plan amid criticism that the configuration favored horses that drew inside.

“It wasn't a chute,” said retired jockey Richard Migliore, who was in the midst of his long career that season. “They basically just put the starting gate on the outside fence. They backed it up as far as they could with room enough, obviously, to load the horses, but there was no true chute there at all.”

Migliore said he was skeptical at first when he heard about the new chute, but changed his opinion after seeing images of how it was constructed.

“It appears to be a proper chute where the angle's good,” he said. “It shouldn't be bad on the horses and the riders to get position and it looks like there's actually a straightaway into the bend, not that it's a long one.”

A half-dozen jockeys tested the chute on Tuesday. A decision on how many horses will be allowed to start from that gate will be made after some races are run. NYRA would like a maximum of 10 starters. The first one-mile dirt race in 30 years will be the inaugural running of the Wilton S. for 3-year-old fillies on opening day. The Wilton drew nine starters, three of them from Pletcher.

A new permanent two-story building on the west side of the horse path from the paddock to the track will open Thursday. The Post Bar and Paddock Suites replace The Post Bar, which operated under a canopy for several seasons. The Post Bar will remain an open-air facility, while the suites above it are climate controlled.

A year after he won the GI Saratoga Derby Invitational with State of Rest (Ire) (Starspangledbanner {Aus}), Irish trainer Joseph O'Brien is scheduled to have six stalls for a satellite division at Saratoga this summer. O'Brien, the son of legendary trainer Aidan O'Brien, and Freddy Head are the only two people to ride and train Breeders' Cup winning horses.

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Highlighted by the 153rd renewal of the Grade I, $1.25 million Runhappy Travers S. Aug. 27 and the Grade I, $1 million Whitney Aug. 6, the 2022 summer meet will open Thursday, July 14 and continue through Monday, Sept. 5.
The Travers Day card will include six stakes races, including five Grade I events.

With a focus on the New York-bred program and certain categories of stakes races, the 2022 summer meet will feature a purse increase of more than $1.1 million over 2021.

Saratoga Live, the acclaimed television show produced by NYRA in partnership with FOX Sports, will return for its seventh season to provide daily coverage of the summer meet to a nationwide audience on the networks of FOX Sports.

Following the four-day opening weekend, racing will be conducted five days a week, Wednesdays through Sundays, apart from the final week, when the meet will conclude on Labor Day.

The reconstructed Wilson Chute, last in use in 1992, marks the return of one-mile races on the Saratoga main track.

The Johnstone Mile for New York breds, to be run out of the Wilson Chute Aug. 12, is named in honor of the longtime horseman and NYRA employee Bruce Johnstone who passed at age 76 in February 2020 following a lengthy battle against cancer.

Saratoga will also pay tribute to the late Suzie O'Cain on Wednesday, July 20 with a 1 1/16-mile turf event for state-bred sophomore fillies.

O'Cain, who passed away in January following a battle with breast cancer, and her husband, Dr. C. Lynwood O'Cain, managed the late Carl Lizza's Highcliff Farm in Delanson, N.Y. for more than 20 years.

To view the complete stakes schedule for the 2022 summer meet, visit https://www.nyra.com/saratoga/racing/stakes-schedule/.

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Any nod to history–especially at America's most history-steeped track–is generally a welcome idea. Originally dubbed the “Wilson Chute” in honor of Richard T. Wilson, the president of the Saratoga Racing Association during the early 20th century, the perpendicular-to-the-stands starting area that ran more or less parallel to Nelson Avenue debuted 120 years ago and remained in use for seven decades before being repurposed as a parking lot in 1972.

Because Saratoga is a 1 1/8-miles oval, two-turn dirt starts at distances of one mile or 1 1/16 miles don't exist because the run into the clubhouse bend has been deemed too short to be fair or safe. The new mile chute should add distance diversity, filling the gap between seven-furlong races that start on the backstretch and nine-furlong contests that begin in front of the stands.

Plus, quirky track configurations are appealing if done right. Think of Santa Anita's unique downhill turf course or the undulating, all-grass topography of Kentucky Downs. The only other North American dirt track with a similar mile-chute setup, Ellis Park, was actually modeled after Saratoga's Wilson Chute when it was built as Dade Park a century ago.

But before wading too deeply into nostalgia and aesthetics, let's be candid: If the idea of one-mile races around 1 1/2 turns at Saratoga is such a no-brainer, why is NYRA just now trying to revive the concept?

After the Wilson Chute fell out of favor in the early 1970s, one-mile starts near that spot were brought back briefly in 1992. But that configuration wasn't so much a true chute as a different gate placement in which mile races started at an angle on the turn.

By the end of that meet 30 years ago, the prevailing perception among horseplayers and horsemen was that those starts were disadvantageous to outside-drawn runners and potentially dangerous because of crowding into the too-quick turn. As a result, we haven't seen a main-track mile at the Spa since.

But do those perceptions match reality? Not if you believe the charts from the 25 one-mile dirt races run at Saratoga in '92.

Before we delve into those numbers, a bit of history:

The 1902 Saratoga meet represented a major positive turn in the history of the track. Its owners had undertaken a $1 million overhaul ($32 million in today's dollars) that included rotating the entire track and its stands 30 degrees (so spectators would no longer be blinded by afternoon sun), and the oval was elongated from one mile to its current nine furlongs. An inside turf track was seeded (but not used) that season, and within that oval was the steeplechase course “with its liverpools and hurdles,” according to a June 1, 1902, write-up in the New York Times.

“The new track is built on scientific principles,” the Times gushed. “It has a mile shoot at the west and a seven-eighth-mile shoot at the south-west end. It always proved awkward starting horses on the curves of the old track, and these new shoots will remedy the difficulty experienced last year.”

Yes, America's newspaper of record actually called them “shoots,” not “chutes.”

On opening day, Aug. 4, 1902, it took five full minutes to get a field of 14 lined up (the starting gate had yet to be invented), and Vincennes stormed from off the pace to win the first-ever mile chute race at Saratoga.

If Saratoga's oddly configured mile races were considered problematic during the next 70 years, those complaints are almost entirely absent from surviving archived news reports.

Then again, the racing press for most of the 20th Century was collectively reluctant to criticize decisions by racetrack managements. Plus, back then there were no internet forums or social media platforms on which horseplayers could air constant, daily gripes. It's possible those races were indeed heavily biased in terms of running style or post positions. But any bettor keen enough to notice probably kept quiet and used that knowledge to cash tickets.

Fast-forward to '92. As Joseph Durso wrote in his opening-day piece for the Times, “For the last 22 years, Saratoga has omitted any one-mile [dirt] races…. The problem was solved by widening the first turn so that the starting gate could be placed on the far outside of the track, aiming the horses across the curve of the turn in something resembling a straightaway. But the configuration still seemed strange.”

As the field paraded in front of the stands for the revival of main-track miles, jockey Julie Krone made eye contact with trainer Scotty Schulhofer and owner Tommy Valando in a clubhouse box.

“She nodded toward the gate, patted the No. 5 [saddle towel] and shrugged,” Durso wrote. “She was fifth in a field of five, and she was saying, in effect: 'I start in right field.'”

As Durso pointed out, Krone finished in right field too, fourth behind a wire-to-wire favorite from post two.

The very next race on the card was also a dirt mile, and it too was wired, from post one. The trend continued into the weekend, with the first four races on that 1 1/2-turn configuration won by speed-centric horses from inner posts.

But shortly thereafter, the trend regressed toward the mean. By the end of the meet, after 25 main-track miles at the Spa, five were won in gate-to-wire fashion, nine by horses dueling or forcing the pace, three by midpack stalkers, and eight by deep closers.

Considering that speed is the prevailing winning style in American dirt racing, a split of 14 on-the-pace winners versus 11 who closed from at least midpack hardly rates as a glaring bias.

It's a bit more complicated to parse performance based on post positions because most main-track miles that summer featured seven or fewer starters, meaning low-post horses simply made more starts than higher-drawn horses.

A number of those races were also either off-the-turfers and/or races run on wet tracks, which exacerbated scratches. Given those much shorter fields, it's no surprise that the three innermost posts combined for 15 victories.

But post four actually produced the most wins overall. The breakdown was post one (4), post two (6), post three (5) and post four (7), with posts five, six and nine accounting for one winner each. So post position stats aren't terribly indicative of a bias, either.

Still, racetrack perceptions die hard. This past weekend, an informal skim of opinions on Twitter and in online handicapping forums revealed what I would estimate to be a 3:2 ratio of “terrible idea” posts outnumbering “great idea” opinions on the revival of the Wilson Chute.

The late Marshall Cassidy, NYRA's erudite announcer between 1979 and 1990 (and a backup caller before and after those dates), weighed in on the idea of bringing back the Wilson Chute in a 2010 comment posting that lives on in the Brooklyn Backstretch blog.

“As to the desirability of a Mile Chute, the beauty of that option lies only in one's wish for comparison shopping,” Cassidy wrote. “Saratoga Race Course abounds in character and uniqueness. As well as lots of oak beams, glorious trees, dripping heat and the Saddling Bell, Saratoga has no Mile races on the dirt. And that is good. My experiences with the Wilson Chute are best described as the Impossible Challenge in that I couldn't see the start from the Announcer Booth (neither could the Racing Form's chart caller!).

“As for the jockeys and racing officials, Wilson Chute starts carried the field diagonally over the crown of the dirt course with an immediate left turn inside the first 12 seconds. By the time they all straightened for the backstretch run, half the field was liable to and for injury or inquiry…” Cassidy wrote.

“As interesting an addition to the wagering menu as Mile-on-the-dirt at Saratoga might be, rest assured there are none now for practical reasons,” Cassidy summed up.

That opinion was penned a dozen years ago. It will now be the job of Glen Kozak, NYRA's senior vice president of operations and capital projects, to instill practicality where Cassidy and others have perceived it does not exist.

Speaking Jan. 14 at a meeting of NYRA's Franchise Oversight Board that granted the budgeting for the Wilson Chute and other projects, Kozak expressed confidence that by moving back the outside of the first-turn fence by up to nine feet, being able to get a full-sized starting gate into the chute, using newer designs of portable rails, and by tweaking the angle of where the chute meshes with the turn, safe and fair main-track miles will be achievable at the Spa this summer.

And if not, NYRA can always mull the concept over for another 30 years before trying it again in 2052.

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Long a distinctive part of Saratoga Race Course, the Wilson Chute was dismantled after the 1972 season to accommodate additional parking. It was brought back briefly in 1992 when 25 races started in the chute, including an off-the-turf edition of the Grade 3 Daryl's Joy, later renamed the Fourstardave Handicap and now one of the most popular Grade 1 races of the annual summer meet.

“The Wilson Chute will only add to the quality and consistency of dirt racing at Saratoga,” said Glen Kozak, NYRA's Senior Vice President of Operations and Capital Projects. “It's a thrill to be able to reconstruct a historic element of Saratoga in a way that will undoubtedly prove beneficial to the summer meet.”

The Wilson Chute was named to honor the contributions of the late Richard T. Wilson, a banker and President of the Saratoga Racing Association for most of the first quarter of the 20th century. The reconstructed Wilson Chute will carefully follow the route of the original chute along the Clubhouse Turn, just to the east of the 1863 Club.

The project to reconstruct the Wilson Chute has the support of the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation and will be accompanied by upgrades to the Tailgate at the Turn picnic area located at the Clubhouse Turn.

Wilson was among a group of investors led by William C. Whitney who purchased Saratoga Race Course in 1900. Mr. Wilson oversaw major capital improvements to the track's facilities, which resulted in the overall beautification of the historic property.

“The Foundation is pleased that the chute that was part of the 1902 Master Plan. designed by landscape architect Charles Leavitt, Jr., is being restored,” said Samantha Bosshart, Executive Director of the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation. “The 1902 Master Plan included enlarging the track, moving it westward, and rotating it 25 degrees as well as inserting a steeplechase course into the infield. The Foundation looks forward to reviewing the plans as they develop. This restoration will certainly add to the excitement of racing.”

Mr. Wilson also served as president of the Westchester Racing Association, which once owned Belmont Park, and as a steward of The Jockey Club. As head of Wilson Stable, he owned three winners of the Travers Stakes: Gallavant (1906), Hannibal (1919) and Wilderness (1923). Wilson also won the Preakness with The Parader in 1901; the Preakness and Belmont Stakes with Pillory in 1922; and bred and owned Campfire, the Champion 2-year-old of 1916 and the winner that year of the Sanford, Saratoga Special and Hopeful, all at Saratoga.

For more information, visit NYRA.com.

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