LEXINGTON, Ky. -- It's that time of year again, turning the corner to Breeders' Cup week. I've been staying up in Louisville during Keeneland's fall meet, so I've had a chance to feel the buzz that's been mounting as the World Championships draw closer. Horses are shipping in from Europe, New York, California and everywhere in between. The number of purple saddle towels on the racetrack increases every morning. I'll go out to the track and work a few for my connections up here, then hop on Route 64 for the quick drive down to Lexington. But starting Sunday, the focus will be 100 percent on Churchill Downs and the big races to be held here Nov. 5-6.

I like the Breeders' Cup anywhere. I just enjoy it; it's something I look forward to every season. They give away a lot of money, and all the champions come together. This year, I'm in a unique position with Classic contender Blame. I've written about him before on this blog, and like I said in the past, I would have traveled anywhere to ride him. I truly believe he's the horse with the best chance to beat Zenyatta.

I'll talk about my other Breeders' Cup mounts in the coming days, but for this entry I thought I'd tell you a little more about the colt and his last race, a second-place finish to Haynesfield in the Jockey Club Gold Cup. You can read more about him and his trainer, Al Stall, in Claire Novak's article that ran earlier this week.

Blame's your traditional mile-and-a-quarter horse. He's only 4, but he has the mentality of an old warhorse. When you watch his Whitney race and you see the photo at the wire, you see one horse covered in mud and the other one that's perfectly clean. Of course, he's the one who takes the dirt in his face and keeps on grinding. He only wants to get down there in the trenches and fight, and he's got a great personality to him. He tries, there's nothing flashy about him, but he wants to do what he does, which is run. So hopefully coming back over to Churchill Downs and getting on his own track, he'll perform and get back to a race that will be more like his win in the Whitney.

Now, he's not a horse that you'd really want to ride in a match race. He doesn't have any tactical speed or anything like that; he's just a horse that wants to get into a grinding mode. He'll run a little close to the pace or a little farther back depending on what you need him to do, depending on how fast they're going up front. But he definitely needs something to run at. In the Jockey Club Gold Cup he didn't get that, and I pushed him along the whole way. At the five-eighths pole, they picked up the tempo a little bit and at the half-mile pole the winner had started to scoot away, and I was in a drive before that. I was already squeezing as hard as I could squeeze without going to the well. There were just a couple of things that worked against us; there wasn't a lot of pace in the race that day and there was nobody to go up alongside Haynesfield. He was able to go off at an easy pace. Instead of going at a decent pace and settling in, he was able to go a slow pace and then pick it up, which wound up hurting us.

Blame still ran good, but he didn't run like a 7-5 shot should have. He was just there, going through the motions. I'm not saying it was a bad performance, it just wasn't up to the performance we've come to expect from him. So hopefully he'll rebound from that race and actually be in a position to run big next Saturday. Hopefully I'll have the home-court advantage.

Depending on the pace in the Classic, I could be anywhere from two to eight lengths off it. Obviously, Zenyatta will be behind me somewhere. Everyone knows she'll be coming.

It's just a matter of how fast.