Mom’s Command Tries for Filly Triple Crown

This girl, the skeptics said before May’s Comely Stakes at Belmont, will get this filly beaten. The outside post and Abigail Fuller, they said on their way to wager against Mom’s Command, were overwhelmingly negative factors for even a top filly to overcome.

Hers is not a name customarily linked to great horses. Top horses are ridden by men named Pincay, Cordero, Vasquez, Velasquez, McCarron or Day--not a 26-year-old girl named Fuller. Not the owner’s daughter.

Those who wagered on Mom’s Command that day were rewarded for their faith in Fuller--or their conviction that she need only avoid falling off to win the Acorn. The skeptics who bet heavily against her allowed Mom’s Command to get away at 2.30-1 odds, the most generous price at which she has raced this year. Fuller and her filly were never threatened and won by 4 1/2 lengths.

The skeptics were less vocal before the mile Acorn and Mom’s Command, at 7-10 odds, took the first leg of the Filly Triple Crown by three lengths without argument. But Mom’s Command was obviously tired at the wire that day and the skeptics, pointing toward the 1 1/2-mile Mother Goose, insisted that Fuller was simply not strong enough to rate a horse with such extreme early speed. But Mom’s Command opened a long lead early and won the Mother Goose by 5 1/2 lengths to assert herself as the leader of her division.

Fuller will be aboard Mom’s Command today when her father’s filly attempts to become the sixth 3-year-old to sweep the Triple Crown series in the $287,600 Coaching Club American Oaks at Belmont Park. The distance is 1 1/2 miles and the competition somewhat more imposing. A victory would give Fuller, who is already one of only two female riders ever to win a Grade I race, the distinction of being the only female rider ever to win this series.