Immediately after Sovereignty’s decisive win over Baeza and Hill Road in the Jim Dandy stretch, trainer William Mott was, for a reserved South Dakotan, emotive.

His athlete had just brought one of his usual deep closing runs to take the win, and in fact for a few strides he was running dead last as he and jockey Junior Alvarado fired up. The run was not simply in time to hit the wire at a mile-and-an-eighth; it had been something else, too, bringing the trainer a flash look of confirmation that he and the team had been on the right track since the June 7 Belmont, nearly two months back.

“Hopefully he comes back good and trains as well for the Travers. We’re trying to get ready for the Travers and that’s the main objective for everybody,” the trainer said.

Quite a lot of the playing public thought he would pull it off, perhaps not with the cliff-hanging moment he provided, but still. Going off at an expectedly low 1-2, Sovereignty paid $3.00.

For his part, Junior Alvarado was never in doubt. “It was everybody else moving and at that time I was just like, ‘Alright let me now kind of start picking it up. I had 100% confidence. I knew what I had underneath me.”

Michael Banahan, Sovereignty’s owner Godolphin’s director of bloodstock in the U.S., was on hand for the win and, like Mott, has his eye firmly trained on the end of August. He said, “It was nice to get that behind him. He trained well into it but obviously he wasn’t cranked up all the way. So, go out there, get the win, and move on to the next one, just like a basketball tournament. Hopefully this will set us up nicely for the Travers. There are going to be new shooters in (the Travers) which you can’t take lightly. So, we’ll want to have our running shoes on that day as well.”