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Originally Posted by CSC
The track was playing for speed all day and he looked comfortable doing it, I don't think it's advantageous to say horses of this caliber will go 25 and 50 and run better, a horse would be fighting a rider for 4 furlongs. In my opinion Summer Bird had the worst trip of the 3 horses yesterday. The results skew the criticisms after the race, majority of the times a horse that takes the lead at the top of the stretch as MTB did wins, if he won there wouldn't be any of this moved too soon debate, on the other hand it is very rare a horse passes 3 horses in the stretch to win the Belmont going away, at one point I thought Kent left him too much to do, but he wins and then all is well.
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Summer Bird got a perfect set-up yesterday. The track at Belmont yesterday, as on Derby Day at Churchill, was not a speed biased race track; rather, the rail was golden. While Dunkirk was setting a strong pace, Summer Bird was covered up comfortably on the inside until the 3/8 pole, when Desormeaux tipped him out to make a well-timed run.
Based on his post-race comments, there is little doubt in my mind that an overconfident Borel moved prematurely with Mine That Bird. Also, for a guy who has made reputation for riding the rail at Churchill, this quote from Pat Forde's column on the ESPN site has got to go down as one of the all-timers:
Borel has made his name with rail-skimming rides and won both his Kentucky Derbies that way -- his ride on Mine That Bird was a ground-saving genius. Yet this time Borel was rarely near the rail, and when he made his move he was about four-wide on the turn.
He said afterward that the rail was dead, which made it a perilous place to run. But winner Summer Bird spent much of his trip down the backstretch far inside.
Perhaps if Borel had ridden a race on the Belmont undercard (instead of taking off his sole - albeit turf - mount), or even watched the races yesterday, he might not have reached such a foolish conclusion. I'm not saying that Mine That Bird would have won the race with a decent ride by Borel, but he was certainly hindered by his rider yesterday.