Mott stable stars highlight busy Saratoga worktab ahead of Belmont festival

Bill Mott’s barn set the pace at Saratoga’s Oklahoma training track, and the worktab carried the kind of names that immediately sharpen the summer stakes picture. In a morning that saw 116 horses breeze, Chief Wallabee may have made the loudest statement: the Derby fourth-place finisher, who wore blinkers for the first time in the Kentucky Derby, went a half-mile in :48.62 and looked like a colt already being pointed straight at the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival.

That move matters because it turns a good Derby horse into a live summer player. Chief Wallabee did not just gallop through an ordinary maintenance drill; he posted a sharp half-mile that fits the profile of a horse being readied for a specific target. With the Belmont Stakes Racing Festival set for Saratoga Race Course from Wednesday, June 3, through Sunday, June 7, and the 158th Belmont Stakes scheduled for Saturday, June 6, the timing put him firmly on the serious shortlist for the meet’s biggest stage.

Mott had other runners doing enough to keep horseplayers interested. Knightsbridge went four furlongs in :49.69, Grand Job covered five-eighths in 1:00.01, and Damon’s Mound drilled four furlongs in :48.64. Those are not just clean, professional moves, they are the kind of works that tell you a barn is sorting out who is ready now and who is being kept in the pipeline for later summer stakes. The common thread was intent: not a sleepy maintenance morning, but a series of drills that suggested Mott has multiple horses moving through the same high-level Saratoga funnel.

Sovereignty was the other name that made the tab feel bigger than a routine Saturday. The reigning Horse of the Year went a half-mile in 50 flat at Saratoga, and that steady half-mile echoed the way Mott handled him last summer. After Sovereignty won the Grade 2 Jim Dandy on July 26, 2025, he returned to the worktab on August 9 and was being aimed at the Grade 1, $1.25 million DraftKings Travers on August 23. That blueprint still matters now: when Mott starts spacing a top colt through Saratoga works, the next target usually is not far behind.

Chad Brown’s Always A Runner also stayed in the conversation, going a half-mile in :48.86 as she opened her Acorn Stakes preparation. Brown said the Kentucky Oaks winner came out of her race in good shape, and the backstory makes her even more intriguing: she won the Oaks at Churchill Downs on May 1 after just two prior 2026 starts, a maiden win at Tampa Bay Downs in February and the Gazelle Stakes at Aqueduct in April. Between Mott’s depth and the names around him, Saratoga’s pecking order is already starting to sort itself out.