Stewards Permit Bullish Move

- Pygmalion, 9-2 in the morning line making his debut in the sixth at Belmont for Kiaran McLaughlin, opened at 3-5, drifted up to 4-5, stubbornly inched up to even money and stayed there. He's a West Pointer, so I guess they had a lot of partners there. He's a son of Freud out of a Polish Numbers half-sister to the speedy Grade 1 winner Behaving Badly.

Pygmalion made a threatening move around the turn, but was hung three wide throughout the long turn. That surely took its toll, and he wasn't catching front-runner Rule Seventy Six. But he was hanging, thus trapping Kent Desormeaux on Be Bullish in on the rail behind the front-runner. So Desormeaux just decided to make his own room. He took Be Bullish out, bumping Pygmalion aside, and persisted doing so until he had a path, which he took on to victory. The head-on shot in particular shows the severity, as well as the totally deliberate nature of the contact.

I was watching at home on TVG; Matt Carothers was doing his 58 Flat program. As he pointed out, Be Bullish was clearly the best horse in the race; and Pygmalion was going nowhere anyway. But he felt, as did I, that it was just too aggressive of a move for the stewards to permit. So I was more than a little surprised when the steward left him up. Seems to me that it sends a signal that a rider doesn't necessarily have to wait for room, and that it's OK to intentionally cause contact in order to find running room. I'd think that could create some dangerous situations. It looked more like bumper cars than what we usually see in horse racing.

- Octave was 1-5 in the Cotillion, oh man. Well, I was right about her getting beat, but Moon Catcher was awful. The past performance lines of winner Bear Now clearly seemed to indicate that she was a Woodbine Polytrack specialist....but I guess not. I'm expecting Any Given Saturday to be 1-5 as well.. [UPDATE: Fairbanks gets beat at 3-5 at Suffolk..]