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Originally Posted by brianwspencer
Well maybe we look at the Shadwell Mile differently. It didn't take a "WAYI" designation for me to think that it's one of the most important grass mile races in America. Regardless of a gimmicky marketing idea, the Shadwell Mile winner should be a part of the BC Mile field no matter what.
While I understand your concern about an extremely deserving horse being left out, your doomsday scenario is going to need a whole lot of wacky entrants for Purim to actually knock a rock-solid better horse out of the field. So what if he was 20-1 in that race? Look at his PPs, TGs, etc. He had some darkened form over his last few, but his fastest and best races were exactly on par with the favorites in that field the other day.
Really, are you that worried that this year's version of Sleeping Indian is going to get left out of the field because Purim ran his eyeballs out a few times this year, and most importantly on Saturday? I'm willing to bet that once entries are drawn for the mile, it won't be Purim who will seem the most questionable of the lot.
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Brian the problem is that there are already 4 qualifiers (WAYI) for the turf mile. What if (when?) they expand the program to 6 or 7 races and you get a couple of bombs winning under adverse weather conditions or other outside factors? Then there may be zero spots open. To me it is a bad idea using gimmicks to award spots in your best races which will serve to further deteroriate our non-Breeders Cup stakes. The difference between the NCAA tourney (which was the idea behind it) and this is that the longshot teams that win the conference tourneys rarely knock out teams with a chance to actually win it all because there are 65 spots where here there are less than 7 in the turf races. The Phoenix winner may be a better example.