ELMONT, N.Y. – Pace. Trip. Course. Distance. None of it seems to matter to Check the Label, who has emerged as one of the top 3-year-old turf fillies in the country.
Saturday, Check the Label will seek her fourth consecutive graded stakes win when she returns to Belmont Park to meet seven rivals in the Grade 1, $250,00 Garden City Breeders’ Cup, run at 1 1/8 miles over the inner turf.
Since leaving south Florida, Check the Label has won the Grade 3 Appalachian at Keeneland, the Grade 2 Sands Point at Belmont, and the Grade 3 Virginia Oaks at Colonial Downs. In her last two victories, Check the Label overcame some adversity to win going away under Ramon Dominguez, who will ride the 120-pound highweight from the rail on Saturday.
In the Sands Point, Check the Label was blocked behind horses until the eighth pole when Dominguez split rivals and Check the Label outkicked Crescenda to win by 1 1/2 lengths. In the Virginia Oaks, Check the Label broke slow, lagged behind a slow 51.82-second half-mile, then once again split horses while drawing off to win by 2 3/4 lengths under a hand ride.
“She just has an extraordinary turn of foot,” trainer Graham Motion said. “Ramon had no intentions of being as far back as he was in Virginia, but it’s just the way it happened. He let her do her thing and he was able to kind of compensate and get out of trouble and finish so well.”
Her recent performances caught the eye of Roy and Gretchen Jackson, whose Lael Stable purchased the filly from her breeder and previous owner Brereton Jones after the Virginia Oaks.
Check the Label has not run in nine weeks, because Motion scratched her out of the Grade 3 Lake Placid at Saratoga when that race was rained off the turf.
Tom Proctor has the uncoupled entry of the speedy Queen of the Creek and the late-running Snow Top Mountain. Both are coming back just 16 days after running in split divisions of the Riskaverse Stakes at Saratoga. Snow Top Mountain should relish the 1 1/8-mile distance.
“If they run with [Queen of the Creek] I just may catch them all with the other one,” Proctor said.
Negligee, third to Check the Label in the Sands Point, returns to the races following surgery to take a chip out of an ankle. No Explaining stretches out to nine furlongs – a distance at which she has already won – after dead-heating for third in a one-mile stakes at Woodbine last time.
