For cycling events, like the Tour De France, for example, there is much planning and coordination to ensure that a team runs smoothly. Nonetheless, you always have some idiot who deviates from the team plan, doesn't listen to the directions over his earpiece and orchestrates a break and messes up his team's strategy.
It'd be hard enough to predict what would happen in a given stage of the tour, even with constant instruction being relayed to the riders.
Now, take it down about 2 million notches and you have your typical jock/trainer team. I've heard enough trainers say that they leave the riding end of it to the jock, as the jock have more experience than they do at it, to realize that there's not a hell of a lot of planning that goes into this game. And, other than Dominguez, most of the jocks out there would probably ride just as well, make comparable decisions, if they rode with their heads in their asses.
Of course, the jock/trainer combo can always blame whatever goes wrong on the 'uncontrollable' horse.
What's my point? It's not a very long stretch at all to watch some of the rides put in by these jocks and just come to the conclusion that they must be retarded, because what they do, over and over, just doesn't make sense.
Like retards, they just never learn. Every so often, they contribute a fine ride and you assume that they'll learn from the experience and duplicate it on a fairly regular basis. Doesn't happen. Why? The only thing that makes sense is that they're challenged.
So, when you have trainers that are allowing challenged jocks to make split second decisions, on horses that, believe it on not, are dumber even than the jocks, every so often the results won't make sense. When you have basically no planning/strategy by the connections going into a race, every so often the results won't make sense.
In fact, that things make so much sense, and so consistently, in this game is, in itself, an AMAZING thing.
Next time you see Mike Luzzi PUMPING AWAY on a horse that already has an easy lead, think of this post
