[King Glorious]

My feeling has always been that the class and ability of the horses determines if it's a strong race or not. Not the grade. I've also learned that old rules aren't as important anymore. It used to be that if you had only two preps for the Derby, you couldn't win. If you never started as a 2yp, you couldn't win. Probably a few more I'm forgetting. While I understand where Rollo was going in saying that Pavel shouldn't have been in the Dandy, I think he's looking at it too traditionally. By that, I mean that we used to always be able to count on the bigger races having the best of the crop. The best of the crop were usually extremely battle tested and proven by this point in the year. But that's rarely the case these days. In my opinion, the only disadvantage Pavel had in that race was experience. It couldn't be said with great confidence that he was not on their talent level. So why not take a shot? I don't think it makes much sense to worry about long term effects. You get 12 races out of them these days and you're considered to have had a long career. So go for it. He lost. So what. It happens. He wasn't embarrassed and it didn't lessen his chances of winning this or being a major factor in the Penn Derby if they chose to go that route. It wasn't like he was facing Java Gold, Alysheba, Lost Code, Bet Twice, Gulch, and Cryptoclearance in the Dandy.