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Being pregnant hasn't kept racing's richest mare, Spain, out of the running. On June 15, about four weeks after she was bred to the leading stallion Storm Cat, Spain won the Fleur de Lis Handicap at Churchill Downs by 3� lengths. Last Saturday the 5-year-old mare finished third in the Molly Pitcher Breeders' Cup Handicap at Monmouth Park in Oceanpark, N.J., bringing her lifetime earnings to $3,540,542. "If the filly or mare is in racing condition while she is bred," says Richard Tramp, a veterinarian with Exclusively Equine Reproduction in Valley Center, Calif., "she can go on for about six months."

Humans, too, have competed successfully while pregnant, though usually woman athletes stay on the sidelines after their first trimester. Some examples of athletes with a baby on board: Margaret Court, who reached the final of Wimbledon in 1971; pitcher Michele Granger, who won two games in 1996 for the gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic softball team; Britain's Alison Hargreaves, who climbed the 5,000-foot North Wall of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps in 1989; two-time U.S. Olympic hockey player Jenny Potter (then Jenny Schmidgall), who took regular shifts for Minnesota-Duluth as a junior in 2000; and Irish distance runner Sonia O'Sullivan, who won the Tesco Women's Great North run in 2001.