I think you may have answered your own question correctly earlier in this thread.

why not be extra cautious with your 50 million dollar horse?

what exactly is risky about galloping a horse that is fine? i said that i can see wrapping him up, but pulling him up is another thing.

so should all $50 million horses be allowed to just pull up whenever they want, while all the other grunts have to battle it out?

he did it not because of a concern for the horse but because of the shame it would have caused to cross the wire 30 lengths behind with a 1-5 shot supposed super horse.

Coa is being criticized her for herding Big Brown on the backstretch? Funny stuff. I guess the irony of this is being missed by most. Desormeaux has been herding and intimidating other riders with regularity. Apparently Coa shouldn't return the favor?

How do you know what was going on in kent Desormeaux's brain ? Thats not what he said in the interview.

Something wasnt right and he didnt know what it was. Better to pull him up then to gallop him out if he wasnt sure.

No doubt Coa is a dirty rider but its all part of the game. Big Brown was the favorite and in order to win you have to beat the favorite. Race riding is part of it. I just hope that Big Brown's connections don't cry about it the way Smarty's connections did.

well, after reading your post, i went back and looked and sure enough, he did win it. which only furthers my point that secretariat did much more than win the tc.

i thought he said the horse wanted to keep going? i think it was kent who got cold feet and felt off, not the horse. i bet kd wanted to puke.

I must be missing the point, with a horse that was eased.

You know what we should be discussing when it comes to trips/rides? How about:

1) Cornelio blocking Kent the length of the stretch on Friday, with the other half of the Mott entry. I've been betting over 30 years and I've seen a lot of stupid **** but a jock going out of his way to shut off a winning move by his entry mate is about as DUMBASS as it gets. YET, no comments on this forum.

2) How about Edgar going 4 wide on the 1st turn with Pays to Dream? I mean, the horse is coming off the pace anyway so why not sit on the rail, like the winner, or the 2 path, like the runner up? Run an extra 30-45 feet or so, lose by 1/2 length and get vanned off. Nice at 11:1 ............

This kind of stuff is interesting when it comes to trips. A horse that doesn't fire, for whatever reason, is not.

Let's try to take it up a notch.

Agreed on all counts. Well said.

I think analyzing the ride is much ado about nothing.

You knew going into the race the other jocks would have a bullseye on BB's back.

You knew going in that Da Tara was going to make the lead - and KJD isn't stupid enough to hook a 40/1 longshot with a horse that has rated kindly and unleashed huge turn moves in both of the first two legs of the triple crown.

You knew going in that the ruthless Eibar Coa was riding Tale Of Ekati - who has tactical speed, was drawn outside of BB, and was obviously going to race ride BB.

In hindsight - the best strategy would have been a seemingly incredibly insane strategy going into the race. It would be for Kent to pull a page from the Ramon Dominguez playbook and stay glued to the rail. The rail was good enough - see Forefathers performance - and as it turned out ... Da Tara was clearly more horse than Tale of Ekati, which means Big Brown would have got out of the box if he had more horse than ToE.

However, Big Brown had no horse so all this doesn't matter.

What exactly is a " dirty rider? "

People comment on fragile horses these days but the animals aren't the only ones that are more genteel than the old days. If Coa is " dirty " then what about one of the greatest riders of all time, Angel Cordero?

Kent likes to get buried inside on the turf....it's his move and hardly Cornelio's fault. Out of curiousity.....did those two horses have the same owner? Didn't Cornelio finish second?

You know what a dirty rider is and Cordero certainly fit the descrption.

I think Desormeaux moving Real Quiet too early ten years ago may have cost him the Triple Crown, but nothing he could have done yesterday would have made a difference. The horse just didn't have it.

I just don't like the word, as it connotes something that I am not sure is true, at least in this sense, as a rider's job is to win. If what you do to win is within the rules, how can that be considered " dirty " riding, and wouldn't it be more fair to say that the rules need to be changed?

Don't get me wrong, I don't like some tactics riders use, but I don't necessarily fault them if they are doing what they can to help their mounts win. I fault riders more for the opposite.

id like to add that all the jocks that rode the 2/9/12 in the 5th should get the shaq award........

Kent likes to get buried inside? Who doesn't like to get buried inside?

Yeah, Cornelio finished 2nd but MOTT LOST a race he could've won.

Think he's happy? Assuming he's even aware of what happened?

Desormeaux didn't think the horse was fine, so he played it carefully. That was the absolute correct thing to do, unless you expect him to give him a full vet exam during the race.

Besides, it isn't like KD eased him while he was running hard for the win. Watch the replay - he doesn't do it until horses are already streaming by him.

The jock had nothing to do with the outcome -- period. Too many people bring far too much baggage to the table and one of the byproducts is to blame the jock. Far too convenient and common. It's kind of like "having to find an excuse" so to speak. The other side of the coin is people who have no idea what they are talking about. Being a good handicapper doesn't mean one knows everything about horses, jocks, etc. and all the "other" aspects of the game. People tend to collapse those aspects of the game as well.

As far as pulling him up -- as I've often said, it's really easy to make decisions from the grandstand or from behind a keyboard. I think people are reading far too much into this. It's not that complicated and there isn't a conspiracy behind it. He did it to protect the horse. He did it because he wanted to save face. He did because . . . because because because. If it makes you feel better, go for it.

As opposed to pulling him up, if he would have ridden the horse out -- there would be plenty of people who would be critisizing that move as well. Funny thing -- I am sure a few of them would be the same people who are critisizing the fact that he pulled him up.

Eric

Forefathers performance was not because of a decent rail, he got an unbelievable trip and was the best horse number wise

i guess I'm naive enough to hope that KD's decision was based on the horses' health. If he did it merely to not suffer the indignity of finishing last,then he has more probems than I can deal with. He's been in and out his whole career, so what you see is what you get!

Unless a gelding wins it, I doubt we'll ever see another TC winner (should we be so lucky) do much of anything after the first weekend in June.

Yet another factor in pulling BB up, I'm sure, was that it was still pretty fraking hot out there. Saint Daimon was pretty miserable after his race- it took them what, ten or fifteen minutes to get him cooled off enough to where he wasn't trying to go down.

show me another instance where he or any other rider pulls up their horse in the stretch and jumps off at the wire, not because there was any indication of anything wrong, merely because there was no response, then i'll believe it was for the horses best interest. if this is the way to go then it should happen about once per race.

After hearing all the crap spewed the last 5 weeks especially concerning horses breaking down, PETA, etc. is it a wonder that Kent D pulled the horse up? I know that i would not have taken any chances knowing that everyone was watching him including people that would try to harm him if something physical were to happen to the horse. Big deal if he pulled him up or not. He is famous for not riding to the wire but in this case I tend to think he deserves a pass.

:wf

The connections knew there was something wrong with the horse going into the race. Everyone knew. The horse had a bad quarter crack. With a bad quarter crack like that, you don't know for sure if it will bother the horse until the horse is all-out in a race. The horse galloped well all week and he worked fine too. But that's not the same as running in a race.

Even if Desormeuax couldn't feel that the horse was sore in the race, he knew that there was obviously something wrong because the horse wasn't firing. He would have had to have been out of his mind to keep riding the horse in that situation. The horse is too valuable. Desormeaux absolutely did the right thing.

so only valuable horses should be pulled up? all i'm saying is if its good for the horse then why not do it all the time?

I just watched the 10th at Monmouth and 3 horses finished slowly between 20 to 35 lengths behind the winner. i'm sure those horses might have some issues as well.

I have listened to all this quarter crack stuff and I hear many say that what he had is common. i don't know really, it didn't look good to me the photo that was shown in DRF. you listen to the trainer say it was not an issue, you saw he had a decent work. its all guesswork really though.

The foot issue was all over the media.
Monmouth coverage of an insignificant race
will not hit all tabloids.

I see what you are saying. The media makes
a huge difference. Oh yes I forgot. This horse
is part of an "investment fund"... protect those assets.
Far more than simple ownership dont ya know.

There are some quarter cracks that are a big deal and others that aren't. It depends on the severity and the location. From all the experts that I talked to who saw the picture of this quarter crack, they said that this was a really bad quarter crack. They said that it was in a bad spot and it was very likely to bother the horse in the race. It's not an exact science and you never know for sure, but there was a very good chance that the quarter crack would bother the horse.

If the connections were going to run the horse, they had to downplay the injury. If they admitted that the quarter crack was bad and that it might bother him, then everyone would have said, "Why are you running the horse if he has a bad quarter crack?!"

So they really had to downplay it. Don't get me wrong, I think that Dutrow honestly believed that it wouldn't be a problem. I think that he thought that the horse was so much the best, that even if the quarter crack did bother the horse and he regressed by 5 lengths, that the horse would still win.

The problem is that you just don't know how much it will bother the horse. Another horse with a quarter crack that looks identical, may have only regressed by a few lengths. You just don't know for sure. It's not an exact science with these types of things.

I can tell you one thing though. Practically every trainer I talked to a few days before the race said that there was no way that they would run that horse if it was their horse.

Brown Was Out Of "brown" When He Took A Dump At The Gate!!!!!

This is a syndrome I call 'hopeful denial'. You see it all the time, not just in horseracing. You convince yourself that the problem isn't that bad because you NEED to not be that bad. Sometimes it even works out that it isn't that bad, which means the next time you do it, you are even more willing to believe.

I blame the Detroit Red Wings. After all, they won their last 4 Stanley Cups in 1997, 1998, 2002, and 2008. In those years, Silver Charm, Real Quiet, War Emblem, and Big Brown won the first two legs of the triple crown only to lose the Belmont.

If you can't tell, I live in the suburbs of Detroit. Go Wings.

Pretty simple to see that Big Brown wasn't going to warm up, watch the replay of the prerace warm ups, Kent knew he didn't have the same horse.

The horse didn't like being stuck inside and they wanted him on the outside and that's what kent did.

Big Brown just didn't do it.:zz:

after reading yesterday about most QC's being in the left fore, and the explanation about left turns...well, big brown didn't have it on the turn. i wonder if he felt some stress to his hoof at that point. couldn't have felt great, that's for sure.
horse is smarter than his people.

Just FWIW, note Billy Turner's comments on page two of this article:

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/mo...9s.html?page=1

But at least one trainer believes the public was short-changed in this Belmont.

Billy Turner is the last living trainer of a Triple Crown winner, Seattle Slew in 1977. Early last week, Turner called Big Brown "a really good horse" who had "the best chance of winning the Triple Crown" since Spectacular Bid came up short in the '79 Belmont. "When the horse has the ability Big Brown does, his talent will make sure he gets the mile and a half."

It turns out that Big Brown covered less than a mile at full speed and Turner isn't satisfied with the various non-explanations. He's throwing his darts at the jockey.

"If the horse bobbled, fine, pull him up," Turner said. "But there was no bobble, no misstep. It was a disaster, the ride was a disaster from the start."

It occurred to one writer that Turner might have been describing the night Roberto Duran called out "no mas" and abandoned his fight against Ray Leonard, who was beating him badly. "A good analogy," the trainer said. "That's exactly what happened." The jockey "was going to be embarrassed, so he decided to pull the horse up. The ride was a disaster, a disaster from the start. In the '60s, '70s, '80s, the stewards would have told (Desormeaux) to leave New York and not come back."

Gee, that sounds familiar. Which one of our resident experts will be the first to step up and say Turner is not knowledgeable about the game?

Dutrow opened the door for other trainers to speak freely. It works both ways.

I might not agree with Turner's comments, but I certainly would listen to them as coming from someone qualified. I also very much agree with Andy's comments, it certainly cuts both ways. Dutrow opened the door and I don't see him ducking from the darts.

I am not going to buy into the "Kent has always had a reputation for not riding out" and that line of thinking. The guy is a professional and this is the Belmont Stakes. This was not a case of not riding out for 3rd, 4th, or a stakes placing. Different situation.

Could Turner be right? Absolutely. OTOH, is it possible that Kent felt, saw, experienced something that Turner didn't or could not have? Absolutely. Could it be something in between? Same answer. Anyway, the race is over. What's done is done and people and their opinion will land where they land.

Eric

Thank You for this. KD is one of the worst. He cops an attitude and the next thing is he is taking your horse in the race 5 wide for no apparent reason. Of interest is he took an Alan Garcia horse, No Reply, wide on a far turn with a horse who had nothing left. The stewards get ear fulls regularly on why this guy isn't suspended off of some of his rides. Thanks for the comment. I agree totally.