GI Pacific Classic winner Knightsbridge (Nyquist) vs GI Whitney winner and 2025 Horse of the Year Sovereignty (Into Mischief). Oct. 31 at Keeneland. Horse of the Year and $7 million on the line in the GI Breeders' Cup Classic.Is it OK to dream?For the dream race to become a dream race, at least one box is left to be checked. Sovereignty will need to win the GI Jockey Club Gold Cup on Sept. 18 at Belmont, not exactly an easy task considering the opposition is expected to include the Japanese superstar Forever Young (Jpn) (Real Steel ({Jpn}). But what if Sovereignty does win? What then? The Godolphin team will have a difficult decision to make.Every racing fan on the planet will be rooting for Godolphin to run both horses in the Classic. It would be the type of theater that would present horse racing at its best, two great horses going after one another in an electric showdown. When it is over, we would know who is truly the best older horse in the sport and who deserves to be crowned Horse of the Year. We don't get nearly enough of this.It would be the sporting thing to do. And there's little doubt that Sheikh Mohammed badly wants to win the Classic, a race his Godolphin stable has never won. Running both horses obviously gives him his best shot. But it's not nearly that easy.Would it be the prudent thing to do? Again, this involves difficult decisions.No one wants to see their star horses lose, especially the ones that perform at the highest level. Either Knightsbridge or Sovereignty has to suffer defeat. Maybe both would lose. Not only is the Classic field expected to include Forever Young, but the 3-year-old stars like GI Kentucky Derby and GI Belmont winner Golden Tempo (Curlin) and Renegade (Into Mischief) will be entering in the picture. And is it really a good idea to give up on Magnitude (Not This Time) after one off race?One option is that Godolphin and trainer Bill Mott will choose to run Sovereignty in the Classic and Knightsbridge in the GI Breeders' Cup Dirt Mile. Knightsbridge is 3-for-5 at a mile, which includes a huge performance when winning the GIII Gulfstream Park Mile by 11 1/4 lengths. He'd be a huge favorite in that race and would appear to be all but unbeatable on paper.Yet, it's only a $1-million race and it doesn't have nearly the cachet that the Classic has. It wouldn't add to his stud value the way a win in the Classic would. It's also fair to question whether or not a mile is actually his best distance. His career didn't truly take off until Mott gave him his first chance in a two-turn event. He ran what might have been the best race turned in by any horse this year when he won the mile-and-an-eighth GIII Monmouth Cup by 10 1/4 lengths, earning that whopping 122 Beyer. He backed that up by romping in the mile-and-a-quarter Pacific Classic by 6 1/4 lengths.Here's still something else to consider: Which one is better?Sovereignty is the more proven commodity, but he is just 1-for-3 this year after losing the GII Oaklawn Handicap and the GI Stephen Foster Stakes. Knightsbridge, the way he has run in his last two races, may be the more brilliant horse. Normally, a good way to compare horses it to look at their Beyer figures, but the numbers aren't easy to interpret. Many predicted that Knightsbridge would bounce off that huge effort at Monmouth–and he did. He ran a surprisingly low 104 in the Pacific Classic for a regression of 18 points. That's probably not going to get it done against Sovereignty, who ran a 112 in the Whitney and a 115 in the Travers.It's a fascinating situation. Whatever Godolphin and Mott choose to do, the sport can't lose, and that's because these are two very special horses who, hopefully, will light things up on Breeders' Cup Day. The Sad Situation at Monmouth ParkIt's hard not to love Monmouth Park. It is a beautiful and historic track that sits just off the ocean and has an atmosphere that few tracks other than Del Mar can match. But times have never been worse for racing on the Jersey Shore.While Monmouth does receive a $10-million purse supplement from the state of New Jersey, it's not enough when the competition up and down the Mid-Atlantic region is at tracks whose purses are fueled by casino money and there are not enough horses to go around due to the declining foal crop.Monmouth has just 800 horses on its backstretch, down from 950 last year. Things are so thin that a normal card consists of just eight races and on each of the last four Fridays, Monmouth ran only six races. On the Aug. 21 card, only 26 horses started. There were two races with three-horse fields and another with just four. The total handle for the day didn't even top $1 million. It was $809,094.Now, the one day that Monmouth has always been able to shine, the day of the GI Haskell Stakes, is in serious jeopardy. The Thoroughbred Championship Series, a collaboration between NYRA and Churchill Downs that will include six races for 3-year-old males does not include the Haskell, and that is a serious problem.The top four leaders in last year's jockey standings–Paco Lopez, Samuel Marin, Samy Camacho, Sonny Leon–have all left town for Colonial Downs, where the racing product has never been better because of its outstanding purses that are fueled by Historical Horse Racing machines.Don't blame the people who work there. Everyone on the team loves racing, which you don't find at many tracks, and if it weren't for the Herculean efforts of Monmouth's head honcho Dennis Drazin the track would have closed years ago.The hope is that Monmouth will get a casino, which would change its fortunes dramatically. But that is not going to be easy. The New Jersey racing industry has had zero luck over the many years trying to get casinos because a powerful Atlantic City casino lobby is always standing in its way. Racing-friendly politicians are trying to change that and a bill is expected to be introduced next year that could mean casinos for both Monmouth and the Meadowlands. But before it goes anywhere, the bill must pass by a three-fifths “supermajority” in the legislature. And even if that happens, all it will do is put the casino question on the ballot and let New Jersey voters decide. In 2016, there was a vote on expanding casinos outside of Atlantic City (it did not specify the racetracks) and went down to a huge defeat, losing by a 77-23 margin.Monmouth won't be going anywhere until the casino question is decided, but if it does not get gaming it's hard to see any scenario where it can survive. That would be tragic.The post A Breeders’ Cup Clash of the Godolphin Titans in the Classic Would Be the Race of the Decade appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.