Ragtime made it 3 wins from 4 starts for Bill Mott and Godolphin as she confirmed the strength of her 2nd placed finish in the Grade 1 Test Stakes last month to win this Grade 3 prize at Churchill Downs on Saturday afternoon. She is perhaps slightly unfortunate not to be 4 from 4 after probably hitting the front too soon and being run down by the strong staying Kilwin in the final strides. The pair were 0.64s (approximately 4-lengths) clear of the rest and a run-out speed of 35.23 mph from Ragtime was over 3 mph faster than the remainder of the field. If she was an unlucky loser in Grade 1 company last time, then she should have been able to assert her dominance with a drop in class and so it proved, but this was far from a simple success for the short-priced favourite.

Having been slow to leave the stalls, Ragtime was the slowest horse over the opening furlong (12.72s) and found herself 1.01s behind the early leader (Delightful Claire) at the end of the first quarter of a mile. The key to this race was the fact that Junior Alvarado didn’t panic. Instead he allowed his point to gather her stride, saving ground around the inside of the bend before kicking for home with 2 furlongs to run. Her final furlong time of 12.21s was a race best, but perhaps the more investing statistic is the fact that her average stride frequency didn’t reach its race peak until the penultimate furlong, where she recorded an average of 2.36 strides per second. For some context, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th placed horses all recorded their race peak stride frequency figures in the 2nd furlong and that late turn-of-foot proved to be more than enough to get Ragtime to the front. 

At 41.09 mph, her top speed figure ranked 6th of 7 and the assumption that the leaders had gone too hard in the early stages is backed up by the fact that the 2 slowest horses on the Speedometer finishing 1st and 2nd. However, whilst some may question the fact that the 20/1 shot Strong State has finished 2nd, and as such has raised some question marks over the strength of this form, the stride data and the fact that Ragtime recorded a race best run-out speed of 34.27 mph (next best 33.06 mph) suggests otherwise. She has already proven herself to be capable of competing at the very highest level and everything that she produced in the closing stages at Churchill Downs on Saturday would suggest that she may yet be capable of adding a Grade 1 success to her CV.