Genuine Risk

USC's basketball team added an imposing presence to its front line Monday. Power forward Alex Stepheson, a 6-foot-9 junior transfer who played his first two college seasons at North Carolina, will become a Trojan and seek a waiver to gain immediate eligibility. Diane Stepheson said her son would try to obtain a waiver because his father suffers from an undisclosed illness that prompted the move to be closer to the family's Southern California home. NCAA transfer rules typically force transfers to sit out one year.

The fastest horse in the Preakness won't be determined until Saturday, but two of the 3-year-olds in the race have already staked a claim to being the hungriest. Technology, a horse who has been battling foot problems for weeks, tried to bite his trainer, Sonny Hine, on Thursday at Pimlico.

The character of the Kentucky Derby winner usually dictates the flavor of the Preakness. There is the charismatic Derby winner. Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Spectacular Bid were of this type. They brought to Pimlico the shared anticipation of singular accomplishment. A truly special horse can carry Preakness week by himself. On the opposite side of charisma's coin is the type that comes to Maryland having to duplicate the success of Kentucky to establish themselves.

Henryk de Kwiatkowski, still fuming over the way the stewards at Hialeah handled a disqualification in the furious three-horse finish in Saturday's Flamingo Stakes, said Monday night that he would file a formal protest with Florida racing authorities today. De Kwiatkowski's colt, Stephan's Odyssey, finished third in the $265,000 Flamingo, a neck behind Proud Truth, who finished second and was a length behind the winner, Chief's Crown.

Ted Atkinson, a Hall of Fame jockey who won 3,795 races, a chunk of them aboard Tom Fool, the 1953 horse of the year, died Thursday at his home in Beaver Dam, Va. Atkinson, who suffered from an undisclosed illness, was 88. Besides his victories with Tom Fool, Atkinson also came within a race of winning the 1949 Triple Crown with Capot.

Trainer Bill Mott, jockey Jacinto Vasquez and the horses Riva Ridge, Bayakoa and Fort Marcy have been elected into the Racing Hall of Fame, it was announced Tuesday at Churchill Downs. Mott, who will saddle Favorite Trick and Rock And Roll in Saturday's Kentucky Derby, has never won the race but has trained 125 horses that have won stakes, including Cigar, the horse of the year in 1995 and 1996. This was his first year on the ballot.

Those races at Churchill Downs last month might have been called the Breeders' Cup, but this year they should have been known as the Owners' Cup. What made the day was that one horse owner overruled his trainer and another owner conceded that his trainer knew their horse better.

If Meadow Star, the undefeated 2-year-old filly, wins her Breeders' Cup race at Belmont Park Saturday, the monetary winners as usual would be her jockey, her trainer and the bettors who supported her. But the biggest winner of all would be the Children's Rescue Fund, which provides assistance for abused and homeless children. Carl Icahn already is a winner, just for a promise.

Capital A Novel John Lanchester W.W. Norton: 527 pp., $26.95 When an author finds a one-word title that fits his book perfectly, it's usually a good portent for its content. And certainly "Capital" is doubly eponymous here, for London - the great city, once capital of an empire and now, since the deregulatory Big Bang of 1986, of the financial world - and for the lucre that is lifeblood to both. What we encounter at the heart of this vibrant piece of fiction, pulsating with events and emotions, is not mere cold cash but also that grander aspect of money as something expected to go forth and multiply - what Karl Marx was talking about in his famous "Das Kapital," providing yet another sly aspect to Lanchester's protean title.

Next to Baltimore's infamous Block, Pimlico might be the roughest place in town -- a strip where ladies had better not venture unescorted. It was here, of course, that the Preakness generated national controversy in 1980, when the filly Genuine Risk was -- in the words of many headline writers -- "mugged" by male rival Codex. On Saturday, Winning Colors was the first filly since Genuine Risk to race in the Preakness, and she encountered similarly rude treatment.