Ron Correll
Senior columnist
Tracksideview.com

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Home sweet home did little to help Rachel Alexandra when she suffered her second loss in a row Friday in the Grade 2 La Troienne at Churchill Downs. Unrivaled Belle battled the reigning Horse of the Year the length of the stretch and beat her by a head in the mile-and-a-sixteenth race over a fast track.

Rachel Alexandra was first out of the gate but settled to the outside of Be Fair as the field headed into the first turn. Jockey Calvin Borel kept her off the rail as she and Be Fair straightened up the backstretch with Unrivaled Belle and Zardana tracking in third and fourth.

The quarter-mile went in 24.79 and the half-mile in a leisurely 48.81. Rachel Alexandra turned up the heat at the three-eighths pole in 1:12.53 but could not shake Unrivaled Belle who had moved into second.

With the home-court crowd imploring Rachel to win, the pair battled from the quarter-pole to the finish line with Unrivaled Belle holding her narrow margin as they went under the wire. She stopped the timer in 1:42.97. Morena was third and Distinctive Dixie was fourth.

Bill Mott, trainer of Unrivaled Belle, thought his filly would run well.  “I had confidence in my filly today; I thought she’s run very well. But I wasn’t confident we’d beat Rachel Alexandra. I mean we’re talking about a champion filly, the Horse of the Year. I told Mr. Vegso (co-owner Peter Vegso) to expect that we’d run well, but not that we were going to win. But here we are. My filly ran huge. She just ran great. And I don’t think it was that the other mare (Rachel Alexandra) ran poorly. She ran her race, too. We just outdid her. They were eyeball to eyeball there and my filly got her. I saw at the three-eighths (pole) that Kent (rider Kent Desormeaux) was sitting there with a lot of horse. I said ‘All right, we’ve still got something in the tank.’ She ran great through the lane – all heart.”

Zardana, the conqueror of Rachel Alexandra in the New Orleans Ladies, was fifth. Be Fair rounded out the field.

Trainer Steve Asmussen said of Rachel after the race. “She’s just not been as fast as last summer. She ran a good race, but not a great race. She does carry a lot more weight. Calvin (Borel) did absolutely nothing wrong today. I thought he got along with her great today. There’s an old adage in racing: You get paid for what you do, but you pay for what you do. I think there’s some hangover. What we have to realize is there has been improvement since her last race. We don’t need a knee-jerk reaction. The defeat last time put a lot of pressure on. You don’t run a horse expecting to get beat, especially Rachel.”

Rachel’s race in the La Troienne looked very similar to the New Orleans Ladies where she ran with the speed, but did not show the turn of foot she had in 2009 when it came time for the real running to begin. The four-year-old daughter of Medaglia d’Oro once again found herself trapped down on the rail when she was battling another horse