On the far side of the solstice, the days shorten now in a delicious tease, but it's never truly summer until the Saratoga meeting kicks off, as the seersucker-and-boater crowd moves north to the Adirondacks, and that circumstance we can heartily greet on July 13. The New York Racing Association has put together 71 stakes races studded over Saratoga's 40-day run to Labor Day, including the $1 million Whitney on August 5. Naturally, here in the post-Triple-Crown/Horse-of-the-Year rush, horsemen and players alike are casting an eye forward to the contenders who are prepping now for the Spa's and the country's big end-of-summer game, the $1.25 million Travers Stakes on August 26. This year will mark the 154th running of the major late-summer stakes held at the track that bears the long-earned reputation for dashing incoming champions' hopes to mop up. The race is far bigger than its purse — its outcome will affect the stud books and the Breeders' Cup alike.

Before we get there, there are two crucial contests, namely, the July 22 Haskell at Monmouth and the July 29 Jim Dandy at Saratoga. Enter the Class of 2023's scratched Derby favorite and Belmont runner-up, Forte, who's very much not mopping up now so much as he is in a furious bid to re-stake his former top-of-the-class credentials. These were the stamps of approval, based on his decisive running style and his Florida Derby win, with which he entered the Triple Crown season, that he then somehow proceeded to lose. Running what's been described as a 'game' second in the Belmont is no small feat, and many owners and trainers would be deeply satisfied with that. But greater things were expected of Forte.

And it will be a daunting order to reclaim those great things in late summer at Saratoga. His Texas-born, New York-based trainer Todd Pletcher has shipped Forte and his many stablemates north from Belmont to the Spa for the duration. Forte's performances to date are not those of Triple Crown winner Secretariat, who, going off at 1-10 in the 1973 Travers, notably met defeat at the hands of a little-known longshot named, of all things, Onion — an upset made all the more glaring and spectacular because it came on the heels of Secretariat's earth-shattering 33-length Triple Crown win in the Belmont.

But Forte remains a force that every classmate of his has to reckon with. As we know from his Derby scratch, he has met with some tough racing luck, but his subsequent Belmont "loss" — if we can call a come-from-behind place showing a loss — to a finely-tuned Arcangelo has not quite been fully explained away. That is to say, no analyst to date has been able to chalk it up to a 'bad day' for the man, although the race was also that for him.

Rather: In the sense that every horse race diagrams how different athletes' abilities work out in a world of furious uncertainties, the question raised for Forte by the Belmont was, admirable though his 'rally' was to snatch second in the very last furlong of the race, what made, or let, him slide in the penultimate third of the race to the point that he had to rally to hit the board? Put another way, his Belmont place showing seems to have been less a result of external factors in and of the race than it was a sum of internal factors, having to do with the athlete himself.

That noted, he has been training ever-so-lightly at Belmont, most recently on July 7, his second work since the Belmont on June 7, when he did a half-mile in 49.94. It's worth noting the extreme care with which the veteran Hall of Famer Pletcher is bringing his charge back to the track. He will put Forte in the Haskell or the Jim Dandy, and, notably, Pletcher has publicly opined that the advantage of the Jim Dandy is that it gives his athlete a week's more distance on the Belmont. That strongly suggests two things: First, that Pletcher leans toward giving his runner more time because the Belmont took a lot out of Forte. Second, the Jim Dandy is definitely a feature of the Saratoga meeting, but as such it is a Grade 2, and perfectly positioned as a prep for the more-demanding Travers.

On the other side of the coin, the Haskell, a million-dollar Grade 1, certainly beckons talents like Forte if not Forte himself, but it does mean freighting down to Monmouth from the Adirondacks, and although the field is by no means shaped up yet, it stands to be a more demanding race than the Jim Dandy. And then there's the drive back north. Does Pletcher want to put his charge through that, or simply stick it out in Saratoga, where he, the trainer, is very much at home?

Forte's campaign to resuscitate his reputation is at a crossroads, in other words. As ever, it depends on how Forte himself plays it. If he steps up in the (planned) light training regime, and seems like he’s ready for action in a week or so, then it's the Haskell. If he needs more time, it'll be the end of the month before we really see him bring his big game to the track.