The Spa Spot: Brown satisfied with another strong meet
Chad Brown, right, talking with exercise riders
Trainer Chad Brown is completing another very successful summer at his home track, Saratoga Race Course. He picked up his 25th victory Thursday with a win in the Grade 2 With Anticipation with Balance the Books. That colt is a candidate to be part of Brown's team at the Breeders' Cup.
Brown is winning at a 30 percent clip and his horses are finishing in the top three at a 67 percent rate. The purse earnings from the With Anticipation pushed him over $1.7 million for the meet. The Mechanicville native has built the foundation for his successful stable with a series of great summers meet at Saratoga. He acknowledges that he will not catch Todd Pletcher for the training title - he trails Pletcher by six wins with four days remaining - but those two have distanced the others at America's top meet. In third place is Steve Asmussen with 11 wins.
Chad Brown
"It’s really gone well," Brown said Thursday. "We had a good meet, even the horses who didn’t win have seemed to have run well."
Brown said the one disappointment is the career-ending injury that Street Life suffered in the Travers.
"The horse getting injured in the race shows you the highs and lows of this game," he said. "As good a meet as we have had, you don’t want to see that happen. Overall it’s been really productive meet. a lot of happy clients and a happy staff and I am pretty happy myself about it. Every year we have been moving forward, we’re just continued to learn. It’s a learning process I think.
"From our success all year, we have attracted more horses and better-quality horses, so we should be be performing better. It’s one thing to recruit the horses and it’s another thing to deliver in the afternoons with them. I'm proud of my staff. They are delivering every day and that is what you need to do."
Brown said that he has some contender left for the final weekend of the meet, including Dayatthespa in Friday's Riskaverse.
"I am not going to catch Todd," he said. "We are just going to stick to our plan. The last couple days of the meet, I am going to enter horses that make sense and if the races don’t make sense to me, I am not going to run them. I have a business to run. And Saratoga is a huge part of our business but just a part of our business."