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Originally Posted by slotdirt
I don't think it's such a bad thing to say that perhaps Flower Alley just needed the race. I suspect that is the case, not injury. Besides, it wasn't like he was facing a bunch of chumps at 'Toga on Saturday. There's no shame in losing in your second start back in darn near a year to horses like Invasor and West Virginia.
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The horse already had a prep race. How short could he have been on Saturday? If a horse is going to be a little short in a situation like this, it means he may run 1-2 lengths short of his best. FA got beat by 10 lengths. There was definitely something wrong. His being a little short could explain a 1-2 length defeat, not a 10 length defeat.
I still would not totally count the horse out though. Pletcher has good vets and they can often get a couple more good races out of horses even if the horse has a fairly significant problem. They obviously need to be careful with this horse because he is a very valuable horse. It's a fine line how hard to push in a situation like this. On the one hand, you can push a little harder than normal if you know the horse is retiring after two more races, which is the case here. In other words, they don't have to worry about doing a little bit of permanent damage to him if he's retiring any way. They can't push too hard though. They don't want the horse to break down.
Trainers will often times find themselves in this predicament with 3 year olds. They will have a 3 year old that has a bad ankle and the Ky Derby is a month away. They have two choices. They can turn the horse out to the farm and be confident that the horse will come back 100%, but if they do this they will miss the Derby. The other choice is to inject the horse's ankle and run him in the Derby, but there is the possibility that permanent damage will be done to the ankle. That means the horse may not be able to come back as a 4 year old.
There are so many things that go on that the fans know nothing about. A trainer will never say publicly, "The horse ran bad last time because his ankle was bothering him. This time we injected the ankle with cortisone, and that's why he ran so much better today." You will never hear a trainer say that. They'll have some bogus excuse as to why the horse ran bad in the previous race. They'll say that he was short, or that he didn't like the track or something like that.