Any Given Saturday gets my offical Derby endorsement

[blackthroatedwind]

Originally Posted by Pointg5

Your points of the perfect trips and easy leads are well taken, but at some point you have to credit the horse for taking advantage of those biases and setups.

Um, no I don't nor would I ever. I debit horses for being in positions to take advantage of track biases because those biases were what created false performances and thus those performances were worse than they appeared. Your post suggests the horse seemed to know there was a bias and was smart enough or good enough to thus take advantage of it. Hogwash. Perhaps the rider was, though in the Gotham it was mostly a factor of him drawing the best possible post, or the trainer was, as was possible in the Illinois Derby as all they had to do to get the fence was take advantage of the worst rider in America in Larry Melancon.

Simply put, the horse's performances, which aren't all that good on face value, are dramatically better than they should be due to circumstances relating to trip. With even a fair trip this horse would be easily three to five lengths worse in each race. He is SLOW and a complete non-factor in pretty much any race he now enters.