Trainer Stanley Gold (Awesome Banner): “He got the chip the first time after we breezed him after he broke his maiden. He showed something was wrong, we x-rayed him and it was there. There was no question involved, it was ‘fix it.’ You just go on, you don’t think about those things. It would have been nice to have him for the Sire Stakes but we did pretty well in the Sire Stakes and now we have a fresh horse with a bright future.”

“[At the quarter pole] I was thinking, ‘Oh, no.’ The one [Union Grace] was starting to get up in there and I saw we were holding him at bay. Then you’re trying to survey the field and you see horses on the outside starting to come up and you start to doubt yourself. Then as you’re moving down the lane the confidence is coming back and you see he’s finishing. You always have doubts first time out and this long off, and when they get pressured all the way you could find yourself coming up short despite whatever you do. There’s nothing like a race to get tight. When he started to draw off in the stretch, I was impressed.

“Because of his demeanor I don’t think distance is going to be a problem. He’s sprinting because we’re training him to sprint and we’re riding him to sprint but he’s never shown any problem to do what you want with. Certainly we’re going to try to stretch him out.

“I think this was more impressive [than his debut] because 4 ½ furlongs, sometimes horses run great and they never run back to it. The track record that he broke was broken the year before, and it’s always at a time of year when the rain stopped, the track is dry, everything’s fast and everyone’s running. It’s hard to gauge with a 2-year-old but the way they do it is more important than when you look up there at the clock. He did it so effortlessly and came back and trained the same way and ran back to it.”

Jockey Jose Caraballo (Awesome Banner): “This is a brilliant colt. I think he’s going to have a long career ahead of him. He is very smart, a smart horse. Anything you ask him to do, he’ll do it. I think he’ll go longer. He’s a fast horse, but he’s not a speed horse, a crazy horse. He’s very relaxed. The few times I've got on him, he’s been very sensible, very smart. Nothing bothers him. He’s very smart."

“Today, I didn’t want to change anything. If there’s too much speed, I’ll make the decision to rate him, and I think he will.”

Note: The owner of Awesome Banner is Jacks or Better Farm. The winning time was 1:09.57.