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Originally Posted by dalakhani
I can't believe I actually agree with Dwayne about this. The breed has changed and its time for the sport to change with it especially on the biggest stage.
How relevant is a 12f dirt race for 3 year olds or for that matter any horse? There is no chance that they will ever run it again and a vast majority werent bred to do it anyway so what does it prove?
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It's a fallacy that the breed has changed. It takes hundreds of years for significant evolutionary movement in a breed. What's changed are
the training methods and nature of the financial aspect of breeding/sales/racing.
The training changed because of the value of the animals involved, trainers cautiousness with them due to their value, and ownerships' need for a return on the much greater investment(s) involved. You don't see Neil Howard, John Shirreffs, and Shug McGaughey having trouble developing horses as an example, because with the owners they are associated with, there is no urgency to earn back what's been invested within year one of the owner's horses on the racetrack.
The Belmont and similar classic distance events are relevant because identifying horses that can excel at those distances are harbingers of the traits the breeding side of the game is supposed to be seeking. The great mystery from the people saying the race distances should be shortened, is that if you do, you only serve to further enhance the sprint and middle distance sire types that are exactly the ones alledgedly 'weakening the breed'. A.P. Indy is the predominant sire of this generation. Which two wins of his confirmed his attributes as a future sire? The Belmont and BC Classic.
In the meantime, in the last two sophomore seasons, Smooth Air and Musket Man have demonstrated perfectly that endurance/stamina are completely obtainable from any sprint-pedigreed horse. If you train them old school, long and slow, supposedly fragile 6f horses bred to go short can magically go 8.5-10f. As a result of the methods of old style training by Bennie Stutts and Derek Ryan, those two have succeeded at distances no one thought they could possibly 'get'.
Screwing around with the Triple Crown distances, and spacing, would be a guaranteed road to ruin for the breed for racing.