IMO, a "good ride" is when a jockey simply makes an effort to put his horse in a position to be successful. After he does that, the rest is up to the horse.

There are times when jockeys will end up in can't win type situations...they might have a need-the-lead type, in a race with four other speeds. They might be breaking from an inside post on a dead-rail track, and end up finding themselves unable to reasonably work their way outside. They might be on a deep closer in a race void of speed. When off the pace, and unable to get out into the clear---they might choose to follow a well-bet rival who appears to have horse..and if it turns out that rival doesn't have horse, they might find themselves in a bad situation.

However, in most cases, a rider should be able to put his horse in a spot that fairly suits him....especially if he's riding a tactically gifted horse.

IMO,a "great ride" is when a jockey steals a race---or does something either tactically brilliant....or works out a perfect trip in a situation where the likelyhood of having a perfect trip is slim.

Don't we agree? I'm saying he gave a crappy ride. I think the 11 had a good shot to win also...I had the 13 to win though, and that was a sickening feeling watching the replay & knowing he was coming down.

I think this notion that going faster up front is going to allow a horse to beat better, or even equal, horses that are running behind him is just silly.

Andy, you are probably right on all counts, and after having a day to think about this, I would have to say... Garrett Gomez SUCKS!
He rode Hard Spun like he was pissed he wasn't on the Filly. Followed directions to a T, but do you really think 3-4 wide, while being choked on a 50 second first half mile is what Larry Jones had in mind? That said, I do totally agree he was not winning that race under any scenario. He did nothing to injure the horse, but he never should have been allowed to ride under those circumstances to begin with.
My opinion of GG is not based on just yesterday, but on a big pile of discarded tickets over the years (or at least my perception of such).

And yet you apparently continue to bet his horses?

IMO, he cannot be too bad if he is on top of the earnings list. Not to say that some individual rides may be less than stellar, but overall, he has the skills and uses them.

--Dunbar

I didn't say he was a bad rider, I just said he SUCKS:)
You do realize this has become light-hearted, nonsense, for me, anyway. I am far more dissapointed with yesterday as a whole, than I am angry at Garrett Gomez.

I think you're absolutely dead wrong.

dream rush yes wait awile for sure...waitawile was a joke he was over confedent thet when they turned for home he would blow by,,imo.....and joey.....you betta talk now mon

http://www.newsday.com/search/ny-spb...,6977749.story

According to post-race comments Gomez made the decision.

Not that it would've mattered anyways.

......you could run him at 2 furlongs and he isnt beating curlin........he is just a cut below.

I ... hate ... that ... horse.

Let's say that John Velaquez would have ridden all 3 of those horses yesterday. Which of those horses would have won?

Dream Rush and possibly Wait a While.

i think gomez thought wait a while was much better than she was, and that my typhoon was much worse than she turned out to be yesterday, that he could gun to the lead when he wanted.

ooops.

Use Prado and not Johnny V- even though he won the big one yesterday, he's been less than stellar lately. . .

Dream Rush wins
Wait a While might win
Hard Spun loses no matter what

He obviously had to go to the lead on Dream Rush from the rail. Once he got on the lead, he tried to rate her the best he could. It wasn't as if he asked her and she opened up 5 lengths and got run down. He slowed her down as much as he could. He couldn't have been any stiller in the saddle. I think the filly was just a little too head-strong for GG to slow her down any more than he did. He had a very tight hold of her. I agree with you that you don't want to go :45 1/5 in a mile race. That is definitely too fast. I don't think he wanted to go that fast, but once she was rolling on the lead it didn't look like he could get her to settle much more than she did.

Honestly, you all are giving WAY too much credit to riders for having an effect on the outcome of races. I suggest spending time handicapping intelligently and forgetting about jockeys and the net results will be much better for you at the windows.

Hard Spun was never going to be able to go the mile and a half.....End of story.

I just find it interesting how everyone piles on guys like Johnny McKee (Lawyer Ron) and Mario Pino (Hard Spun) when they go too fast or too early on big-time horses, but Gomez gets a pass because there was "nothing he could do."

I am with you Joe. While I didn't play Wait a While (I played Take the Ribbon) that ride was moranic. Lets let a gritty horse go 50 and try and catch. Who gives a **** if your horse isn't a speed horse, if they go 50, he should have been right next to her, not 1.5 back.

Hard Spun, I agree with everyone else, not getting 12....Dream Rush, I just don't know. I think alot of it might have to do with the training job, and while I am no expert, I have seen guys try to dull speed in the morning when stretching out, and it didn't seem like DR speed was dulled at all.

Interesting! Thanks for posting the link.

--Dunbar

"Others emerged frustrated from the Belmont, notably Larry Jones, who trains Hard Spun, second in the Kentucky Derby after setting a suicidal pace, and third in the Preakness, in which he was embroiled in unreasonably fast fractions and fourth yesterday with Garrett Gomez riding while never involved in the pace.

"The pace was very slow. I thought that was our game plan leaving the paddock: to have these kind of fractions but be in front doing it," Jones lamented. "Apparently, we had a miscommunication somewhere."

Gomez, who until yesterday was Rags to Riches' regular rider but committed to Hard Spun while Pletcher wrestled with the Belmont decision, saw the race differently.

"At the half-mile pole, I felt I was in a great spot," he said. "At the three-eighths pole, I thought I was money. When it was time for sprinting, he just didn't have the turn of foot the other two had."

This borderline proves that Gomez mailed in the ride. For him to say he thought he was money at the 3/8ths pole is ridiculous.
He still SUCKS!

Hey......
 

I had to go do freakin laundry, so i missed Monmouth, how did your horses run?

.........yeah, he is soooo bad. i cant believe the greatest trainers in america use him:rolleyes:

So are you saying that he rated Dream Rush too much?

I give up.

My Daddy always said, I have never seen a jockey win a race on his own, but I sure have seen them lose plenty.

I don't know, I thought Ramon pretty much won the 10th on his own on Saturday. That was a downright glorious ride.

If he's so bad then why is he on top of the national standings for the 2nd year in a row?

Your tongue-in-cheek detector is awful.

If it makes you feel any better, Joey, I thought his ride on Hard Spun was questionable as well. At least his record in the Belmont is better, though. Instead of having an 8th place finish aboard Bob and John as his best Belmont ride, he now has a 4th place finish on Hard Spun.

I guess after thinking about it more, Jones was more comfortable speaking his mind. He seemed to have a lot more to say about Gomez and his ride. I am not sure where the story, comments, etc. that I read come from, so I won't reprint them here without being able to quote the source. But to say the least, Jones was more outspoken about Gomez and his ride.

Eric

You know, I just don't know, i was on tilt and was just firing but all I really remember was Wait A while throwing her head like she was having a fit......

After listening to Gary Steven's commentary on Thursday, I was convinced that Gomez would rate the horse. Stevens was saying that HS is kind of a head-strong horse and after seeing what happened in the Preaknesss and not wanting that to happen again, that Gomez would come out of the gate with a hold on the horse. The reason being that Gomez did not know whether anyone else would be gunning or not. If someone else did gun and Gomez came out of the gate asking the horse, then it would be too late to take back because HS is quite head-strong. So I think that GG made the decision to take back from the start. Once he saw how slow they were going, he could have let the horse take the lead, but I think that Gomez was happy that the horse was rating kindly and he thought that he could go by the two horses on the lead at any time. He knew it was a long race and he knew that the horses to beat were behind him, so he decided to sit tight.

Was it a mistake in hindsight? I would probably say yes. With a horse as fast as HS, if I knew I could get an easy lead in :49 3/5 or so, I would much rather do that than be sitting behind horses going :50. On the other hand, we don't know if those other two horses would have left GG alone on the lead in :49 3/5 if GG would have gone to the lead.

I'm sure that if GG knew that the other horses would have given him an easy lead in slow fractions, he would have been happy to take it.

Anyway, it was a tricky situation due to the fact that HS is head-strong. I don't think the ride cost the horse anything. I think he would have probably run 4th either way. I think that GG is the best rider in the country and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt due to the totality of the circumstances. I can certainly see why people would question the ride.

i honestly feel bad for him that he lost being rags to riches regular rider - that's a load of crap, i think anyway.. but that's just me. i don't think that was fair on the part of pletcher, people are gonna say "well he shouldn't have committed to hard spun" but, he wasn't even told til 930 AM on the day prior to entries that the filly was in. not saying he should be thrown back on rags, but still - well, i guess that's racing. but that's just my thoughts.

Found the source -- none other than the NY Post . . .

Eric

http://www.nypost.com/seven/06112007...y_kerrison.htm


JONES GIVES JOCK GOMEZ 'HARD' TIME
By RAY KERRISON

June 11, 2007 -- COWBOY Larry Jones came out with both barrels blazing yesterday against the "nonsensical" ride top jockey Garrett Gomez gave his horse Hard Spun in the Belmont Stakes.
As he grazed his Triple Crown warrior outside the barn, Jones said up front, "This is probably not a good time to ask me a lot of questions about the Belmont."

Then, for the next 15 minutes he fumed, "I'm really starting to wonder whether any jockey has a clock in his head anymore. You could tell the old time jocks how fast to go and if they were off even a fifth of-a-second, they'd be upset with themselves. I really don't know whether these (modern) jocks have a clue as to how fast they're going."

What set Jones off was the incomprehensible tactical decision by Gomez to wrangle a free-running horse like Hard Spun back behind two leaders, C P West and Slew's Tizzy, who were running one of the slowest-run Belmonts in history.

You have to go all the way back to 1969 to find a Belmont run in such snail fractions as Saturday's crawl. That year, Arts and Letters won after going 6f in 1.16.1 and the mile in 1.40.1 on a fast track. Saturday, C P West led the field through six furlongs in 1.15.3 and the mile in 1.40.2 on a fast track.

Larry Jones could not believe his eyes as he saw the fractions posted on the infield board and saw his horse being strangled back in third place behind the leaders. What made him even madder was the memory that Hard Spun helped lose the Preakness for the exact opposite reason - he was burning the track with blistering fractions, flying through six furlongs in 1.09 and change.

Just about everybody, including Jones, expected Hard Spun to be the Belmont pacemaker.

"I tried to explain to Gomez to slow the pace down, but I told him that if this horse could get the 6f. in 1.13 or 1.14, we'd be home free," Jones said. "I never dreamed we would be going in nearly 1.16 and not be on the lead."

As this was going on, Jones complained, "Gomez kept reaching to get a bigger hold" on Hard Spun. He said after the start, Gomez dropped Hard Spun to the rail, then on the turn, swung him out wide, a tactic that clearly mystified Jones.

The race chart backs Jones to the hilt. It reads, "Hard Spun raced erratically while fighting his rider and tucking in, drifted out on the first turn, stalked the leaders five wide along the backstretch."

Five wide! "I don't know what we were doing," Jones said. "Before we got to the half-mile pole I told Cindy (his wife) 'We got no shot.' "

He said he would study the replay of the race later this week "to see if I can make any sense out of what happened." He added, "Right now a whole lot of things don't make sense. It was not a good race and I don't think Mr. Porter (Hard Spun's owner) was any happier."

The irony of Jones's problems is that he fired jockey Mario Pino off Hard Spun for what he deemed an unsatisfactory ride in the Preakness. Everyone thought he made a smart move replacing Pino with Gomez for the Belmont.

Complicating the situation is that Gomez last week tried to get a release from his commitment to ride Hard Spun so he could take the mount on the eventual Belmont winner Rags to Riches.

A few days before the race, I asked Jones whether he was compromised by forcing a reluctant jockey to ride his horse. "Oh, no," Jones said emphatically. "Garrett is a professional and he will give the horse his best ride."

But Jones is not the only Belmont participant bewildered by its unfolding. Nick Zito, who trains C P West, was startled to see his horse leading the parade around the track.

"We thought Hard Spun was going to be on the lead," he said yesterday. "We figured he would go the 6f in 1.12 and we'd be sitting next to him, as in the Preakness. But it didn't work out that way."

Zito did not blame his jockey Edgar Prado for putting C P West on the lead. "I thought we would have a great trip, tucking in behind Hard Spun, but when no one wanted the lead, Edgar took it."

"I didn't want the lead, but my horse came out well and he took it," Prado said. "The pace was slow but it didn't help me. Not many horses want to go a mile and a half. Those two horses (Rags to Riches and Curlin) went by me so fast I couldn't believe it."

The pace of the Belmont and the riding strategy was the buzz of the backstretch yesterday, but the stewards, apparently, found no reason to ask any questions.

^^^

then you should've kept pino on you moron.

I have to give him the benefit and assume that his words came out different than he meant.
He had to know Hard Spun wasn't going to out-kick anyone home in one run.