ESPN Horse Racing

Updated: August 30, 2009, 12:20 AM ET

Rachel still the top 3-year-old

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By Paul Moran
Special to ESPN.com
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Travers

Summer Bird wins the Grade 1, $1 million Travers Stakes for 3-year-olds at Saratoga on Aug. 29, 2009.

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Travers

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. -- While Summer Bird added the 140th Travers to a resume that already listed the Belmont Stakes among his credits on Saturday, Rachel Alexandra rested nearby, perhaps a half-mile on the other side of Union Avenue, in the Saratoga stall that has been her summer home.

Without her lifting a hoof while seven 3-year-old males who answered the bell for the Travers splashed through 10 furlongs, most slowly, the chasm that separates the nation's leading 3-year-old filly and its best colt was widened considerably.

Sometimes, it's not what you do that is most effective, but what you choose to not do.

By any measure, Summer Bird is a high-class racehorse. He took the fight to a half-dozen others in the Travers, raced in unexpectedly close attendance to a very ambitious pace run over a sloppy racetrack. Summer Bird dispelled the notion that he is a one-dimensional closer, and won by 3 ½ lengths with authority over a surprising Hold Me Back and a disappointing Quality Road. The others were of no consequence. In the process, having defeated the Kentucky Derby winner, who was absent from the Travers, in the Belmont, Summer Bird is virtually assured a divisional championship at season's end.

At the beginning of a journey that has led Summer Bird to two of the most exclusive winner's circles in which a 3-year-old can hope to be photographed, the colt, now a dual Grade 1 winner, had no more stature that Mine That Bird. On the afternoon on which the Derby winner rallied along the Churchill Downs rail to win at 50-1 odds, Summer Bird was finishing strongly though seven-wide and finished sixth, at more than 43-1.

At the time, Rachel Alexandra, who on the previous afternoon had scored a stunning 20-length victory in the Kentucky Oaks, was bound next for the Mother Goose Stakes at Belmont Park, a race she eventually won but not before a change of ownership and an authoritative victory over males in the Preakness.

Mine That Bird has been defeated three times since the Derby, once, in the Preakness, at the hands of Rachel Alexandra, once in the Belmont won by Summer Bird and once in the West Virginia Derby, a less than proud moment. Summer Bird's ascent to the division leadership after becoming the 30th Belmont winner to win the Travers was interrupted in the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park, where he was a soundly defeated runner-up behind Rachel Alexandra.

So, as the summer draws to a close, the 3-year-olds of 2009 amount to this: Rachel Alexandra and others who are not in her league, or close.

Jockey Kent Desormeaux, admittedly surprised by Summer Bird's early enthusiasm in the Travers, blamed the defeat at Monmouth on -- surprise -- the racetrack, which was sealed and sloppy, as was the track at Saratoga on Saturday.

"I don't believe that Summer Bird enjoyed the going that day," Desormeaux said after the Travers. "It was sealed, hard and speed favoring. The track here is different. The material is different; more cushion. The real Summer Bird was able to strut his stuff not in New Jersey, but in New York."

Blaming a 27-day old, six-length defeat on a different kind of sealed slop may be a bit of a stretch and the fact remains that Summer Bird had no more an answer to Rachel Alexandra in New Jersey, where he was beaten by six lengths, than did Mine That Bird in Maryland. More evidence of the real distance between Rachel Alexandra and the best male 3-year-olds: Summer Bird finished a length in front of Munnings in the Haskell. Munnings also ran at Saratoga on Saturday and finished a non-threatening third behind the disqualified Vineyard Haven and adjudicated winner, Capt, Candyman Can, in the Grade 1, 7-furlong King's Bishop Stakes.

In the aftermath of the Travers, the decision by Rachel Alexandra's principal owner Jess Jackson to pass the "Midsummer Derby" in favor of a more historically meaningful engagement with older males in next Saturday's Woodward Stakes seems almost inspired. By doing nothing, Rachel Alexandra's position as the best 3-year-old of either sex was only enhanced by the Travers result.

"Winning this race means as much as winning the Belmont," Summer Bird's trainer, Tim Ice, said. "I feel like he's going to get better."

Ice is, perhaps, correct. Barring an offer that his owners, Kalarikkal and Vilasini Jayaraman, cannot refuse there is much racing in Summer Bird's future, and considering the strength of the competition, much to accomplish in the absence of the world's fastest filly.

But whatever this Travers winner accomplishes, when the rain finally abated at Saratoga on Saturday, the gap between Rachel Alexandra and her male counterparts is wider than ever. If she is as dismissive of older males as she has been of those of her own age who have challenged her to this point, there is but one meaningful task that remains in this season: A showdown with the undefeated if less sensational behemoth mare in the West in what would be seen as the race of the year.

After the Woodward, the racing world will demand Rachel Alexandra vs. Zenyatta and it will be difficult for either camp to turn a deaf ear to the clamor.

What's good for the game is, well, good for the game.

Paul Moran is a two-time winner of the Media Eclipse Award, and has received various honors from the National Association of Newspaper Editors, Society of Silurians, Long Island Press Club and Long Island Veterinary Medical Association. He has also been given the Red Smith Award for his coverage of the Kentucky Derby. Paul maintains paulmoranattheraces.blogspot.com and can be contacted at paulmoran47@hotmail.com.