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Originally Posted by moodwalker
Anyone who could get Purge to do that is an angel in my eyes.
That horse was just listless up until Gomez got after that ass and brought him on home. I could actually hear the stallion fee going up when I saw Gomez getting after him through the lane.
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The guy just has a gift. He does such a great job and getting horses to relax and to settle into the place that will maximize their effort. Every horse has an ideal pace that they want to run at. It's an extreme example, but you wouldn't want to drop back to dead last by 12 lengths with Henny Hughes. If you did, he wouldn't run as well. By the same token, you woudn't want to gun Circular Quay. He wouldn't run as well if you did. Those are extreme examples. No jockey is going to drop back to dead-last with Henny Hughes and no jockey is going to gun Circular Quay. It's going to be more subtle than that. With Circular Quay, Gomez dropped about 14 lengths back. Any jock would have taken the horse back, but some jocks may have only been 9-10 lengths back. In this case, it wouldn't have mattered. The horse would have still won. He wouldn't have won as easily. He would have probably won by 2-3 lengths instead of 4 1/4 lengths. But if the field was a little tougher, being in the perfect spot could make the difference of winning instead of losing. There will be a lot of races where the top few horses are pretty equally matched and being in the perfect position can make the difference between winning and losing.