You have to search far, wide and foerver to find a reason why Smarty Jones should lose the Belmont Stakes or find a horse who can beat him, and the end result may be that the quest was futile in the first place. But I have made the search and have found the horse.

There's one horse in the field who has a slimmer than slim chance of defeating him and it is Purge. Yes, that's Purge we are talking about, the same colt who twice had his doors blown off by Smarty Jones down in Arkansas in the Rebel and Arkansas Derby. Forget the rest. It's either Smarty in the predictable cakewalk that will produce a $2.20 payoff, racing history and a lot of happy racing fans who have been starving to see a Triple Crown winner or a momumental upset pulled off by Todd Pletcher.

After watching Smarty Jones obliterate the competition in the Preakness, Pletcher never imagined he'd be going to the Belmont with Purge. Smarty Jones had already handled his horse twice and seemed to be getting better with each race. Pletcher has never been one to just throw any old horse into a race just to say he took part in the Triple Crown. He runs them only when they belong.

"We had already tried to beat that horse twice and couldn't do it," he said.

But he was forced to reevaluate things when Purge went out and destoyed some pretty good horses in the Peter Pan, a week after the Preakness, beating runner-up Swingforthefences by 6 3/4 lengths. Master David was third. The Beyer figure was a 108, basically the same number Smarty Jones was running in his races before he freaked out in the Preakness and ran a 118. In the six weeks between the Arkansas Derby and the Peter Pan, Purge had obviously improved and was not the same horse who went down so meekly to Smarty Jones at Oaklawn.

"This is a very good horse and people might not have realized that until he won the Peter Pan," Pletcher said. "We went to the Rebel because we were on the Derby trail because we thought we had a horse who was good enough. All his figures indicated he was. If Smarty Jones didn't show up in Arkansas or if we chose a different route we very well could have gone to the Derby undefeated ourselves."

More importantly, with the Peter Pan win, he emerged as perhaps the only viable candidate to beat Smarty Jones. For that reason, the savvy New York linemaker Donald LaPlace made him the second choice at 5-1 and not Preakness runner-up Rock Hard Ten.

"I think that he is a better horse now, but he's going to need to be a better horse," Pletcher said. "Like everyone else in this race, we've got to run the race of our lives and we've got to hope that Smarty Jones doesn't."

Besides his recent top form, the one characteristic that sets Purge apart from the other seven who will face Smarty Jones is his tactical speed. That's always a dangeous weapon but never more so than in a mile-and-a-half race where horses who come from left field never seem to win.

The way the race sets up, Smarty Jones and Purge should be one-two in some order, cruising through what will likely be very slow fractions. The rest of the field consists of poldders who might fall hopelessly far behind. Let the first half go in :50 and Smarty Jones and Purge are going run one-two the whole way around the track.

On paper, it appears that Purge is the faster horse. He made the first move in the two Arkansas races, leading Smarty and the rest down the bacsktretch. With trainer John Servis having lately trained Smarty Jones to relax as much as a possible in the early stages of the race, there's a scenario whereby Purge could take an uncontested lead and try to steal the race. That's not what Pletcher wants.

"Take Smarty Jones out of the race and I'd love to be loose on the lead," Pletcher said. "With Smarty Jones in the race, we're right back to a situation where we've twice proven we can't go to the lead and beat him. We need to change that. We have to go into this race with the idea that we have to beat Smarty Jones to win. If that's the case, we have to change what we have done unsuccessfully twice. If Smarty Jones is a late scratch, we'll be loose and it will be a case of come get us."

Either way, Purge is going to be the one near to Smarty Jones throughout and the one with the first chance to pounce on him. That could turn the Belmont into a half-mile match from the far turn to the wire.It's still 1-5 that Smarty Jones with that short battle down the stretch, but Purge will at least be in there with a chance. Will he be good enough? It's highly unlikely, which is not to be confused with entirely impossible.