Who exactly was getting "fleeced" reference TGM? You consider Coolmore uneducated on the gambling nature of horse racing?
I'm sure Coolmore was well aware of what it was doing when buying this colt. The point is that people with money looking to get involved in the sport might be off-put by a story like The Green Monkey's.
Not to mention the ridiculous initial post, that suggested that for some reason we should be happy Coolmore will eat $6 million or so on this horse and that the 2yo-in-juring sales are supported (you know, because those sales companies are really hurting for a buck).
If you're going to call anyone who buys a horse at a sale "getting fleeced" if the horse "barely gets to the races", well, 20% of owners are getting fleeced every year, right now, and always have been.
I'm well aware of the "gamble" of buying a horse to race. But not everyone pays ridiculous amounts of money for a single individual that cannot possibly be recouped on the racetrack.
What does anyone care what Sekiguchi or anyone else pays for a horse?
Well, when people pay exuberant prices for horses, and those horses actually show talent on the racetrack a couple of times, that's when we start hearing phrases like, "we could run at 4, but economically, it's impossible to keep him in training"...
Besides, doesn't the overblown prices the big guys pay for horses artificially drive up the prices for all the horses at the sales?
This fascination with TGM by outsiders is ridiculous. His owners haven't put him on a pedestal. Either has his trainer.
The fascination with the story is not ridiculous, its the story itself that is ridiculous. Back in the '70s and '80s when everyone was still racing their horses, Robert Sangster found great success by striving to produce stallions instead of racehorses. By getting a young horse to snag one or two top class races and then whisking it off to stud, he popularized marketing a horse based on potential rather than actual performance. That's all fine when you're the only one doing it, but now 20 years on, everyone is doing it, trying to produce stallions not caring whether they can actually run or not. Meanwhile, the quality of racing has nosedived.
The Green Monkey's story is this process in the extreme. The absurd part is that here's a horse that even if he could run like Secretariat probably would have no shot at earning back his purchase price on the racetrack. And the sad reality is he can't run a jump...
That his owners have the werewithal to pay $16 million, and barely blink, for something that they simply desire, sure seems to grate on alot of people's nerves.
Yeah, let them eat cake...
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