Monday Morning Message with Jason Beem Aug. 24, 2026

Jason discusses this past weekend's Claiming Crown Showcase and talks about the series. 

A good Monday morning to you all! Happy Travers (G1) week and Charles Town Classic (G2) week! We’ll talk about both those races a bunch on the podcast this week as both should be a lot of fun. The Charles Town Classic remains one of the most fun nights of racing I’ve ever attended at the track and highly recommend going if you find yourself near West Virginia. 

This past weekend here at Colonial was Claiming Crown Showcase Day, where horses were not only eligible for big purses here in these starter allowance events, but the top two finishers in each race would qualify to run in the Claiming Crown finals at Churchill Downs in mid-November. The Claiming Crown is a series of “starter allowance” races, which basically means that if a horse has run in a claiming race of a certain amount in the past couple of years, he or she will be eligible for these starter allowance races. 

The event started in 1999 and I believe began at Canterbury Park, where it was primarily based for the first 10 years, although it did make stops at Parx and Ellis Park and even Fair Grounds. It was always kind of billed as a big day for the everyday claiming horses and a chance for them to take center stage but also run for huge purses. The event was stationed at Gulfstream Park for several years as well and now is settled in at Churchill Downs. 

I loved the concept initially, but like most things, when you start throwing big money at it, the big connections will swoop in and take it. It did seem like for a long time that a few big-name barns would really focus on it and play the game well in terms of getting or claiming eligible horses and then improving them. 

I think one of the issues with starter allowance races in general is sometimes you get horses that are wildly better a year later or a barn switch later than they were, and they end up towering over their rivals in the race. It creates lousy betting races sometimes. It also usually creates the winningest horses many years as sometimes a good starter allowance horse will rack up 10 or more wins in a season because they can just keep hammering the same bunch. 

Saturday’s races at Colonial, though, seemed to feature some pretty even playing fields. Now granted, the first race saw a 4-5 shot win, but it was by a nose over an 18-1 price. A 2-5 horse won the second leg, and I immediately thought, “OK, here we go, Claiming Crown chalk fest.” But then we saw a 3-1 and 12-1 qualify in the third race. 

Then a 40-1 shot blew up the toteboard in the fourth qualifier of the day. A few more favorites and a 7-1 completed the lineup, and overall I thought there were some good storylines and upsets. I’m excited to watch the finals and hope that there are big full fields of evenly matched runners. 

As I said, I love the concept, I think sometimes it just doesn’t play out all that interesting, but that’s kind of all big days. It seems so often the biggest days can just kind of chalk out. Maybe the best horses are just sometimes the best and that’s that. I just always see things from the bettors’ point of view, and to me, the priority always should be how do we create the most even and exciting races. I hope that in November at Churchill I’m proven wrong about starter allowances, and we see some really great races for the big money, under the ‘Spires! 

Have a great week everyone!