In days gone by, the Breeders' Cup Classic would be so laden with talented horses that I would anticipate the running over and over in my mind, days or even weeks before the gates ever opened. Looking at what we might see this year, I may find myself watching the Alabama-Tennessee game instead. Forgettable.

Disappointing news this week when Aidan O'Brien announced that last year's spectacular winner of this race and the Irish Oaks, Magnier/Smith/Tabor owned Peeping Fawn, was not ready for her first race of the year.

In order to remove myself from the problems that are confronting American racing right now, for one weekend, I am intent on going across the pond for my action.

Have you ever tried explaining to a friend who is attending the races for the very first time, why these majestic animals that are bred to run, must be whipped? You feel that familiar flush of embarrassment, knowing what you are about to say is something you don't believe yourself.

Vincent O'Brien and Aidan O'Brien are of no relation, but you couldn't tell it from their results. The younger O'Brien won four Group 1 stakes last week at Royal Ascot, saving his greatest feat for Thursday when Yeats won his third consecutive Gold Cup for the Coolmore connection.

The next to last day of the 2008 Royal Meet at Ascot Race Course came up windy and cloudy with the ground much harder than most European runners desire. Rain would not fall until the fifth contest of the day.

The Group 2 Norfolk Stakes was the first race on the card of day three at Royal Ascot. The son of Forest Camp out of the Forty Niner mare, Brittan Lee, won his first start at Carlisle by a double-digit margin. Today, he squeaked out a win over the Irish-bred Spin Cycle with English bred Prolific and Flashmans Papers were third and fourth. It sounds foolish to say that the next three looked better than the winner, but that could prove to be the case when the distances become more taxing than the five furlongs traveled today.

Unlike last Saturday, this time the superstar delivered. Big time. There is only one true superstar on the Thoroughbred racing planet right now, and it isn't that worn-out 3-year-old who dissolved into a Big Brown meltdown in the Long Island heat during last Saturday's Belmont Stakes.

These are the delicious days, the days of debate and doubt as we wait for the Belmont Stakes, the toughest race to win in the United States and the last leg of the Triple Crown. There is no better time to be a horse racing fan.

The tack boxes spaced along the shedrow at Barn AA are painted red and blue, the devil's red and deep blue of Calumet Farm's racing silks. These are the colors Whirlaway and Citation carried when they swept the Triple Crown races of 1941 and 1948. They are the colors flown by Pensive and Ponder and Hill Gail and Iron Liege and Tim Tam when those good ones dashed home first in the Kentucky Derby.

Barron's, last week, asked this question: "This economy keeps dispensing with decades of statistical precedent. We have a 23-year-high inventory of unsold homes, a 49-year-low in per-capita home sales, a 28-year-low in consumer confidence, and an all-time high in inflation-adjusted oil prices. With it all, is it impressive of inexplicable that the Standard & Poor's 500 is merely at a one-month low, and just 12% below an all-time high?"