My horse of the year scenarios

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by SentToStud

Like what?

allbetter-zine...

[miraja2]

COULD Student Council be receiving some "extra-special" medication? Yes, given the record of his trainer, that obviously has to be considered as one possibility.
But I think people that automatically assume he is just because he went from competing against allowance horses to beating "G1" and "G2" horses are forgetting something important. Right now, the line between top-level allowance horses and graded stakes horses is sometimes so blurry, I am not even sure it is there at all. It doesn't always require shady behavior for a so-called "allowance horse" to win some of these big stakes races, given the low quality of the fields.
It isn't like this horse suddenly became Man O' War. He has yet to break 2:05 in either of these last two races. But when you are racing against the AP Arrows of the sport, it just doesn't take a whole lot to win.

[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by miraja2

COULD Student Council be receiving some "extra-special" medication? Yes, given the record of his trainer, that obviously has to be considered as one possibility.
But I think people that automatically assume he is just because he went from competing against allowance horses to beating "G1" and "G2" horses are forgetting something important. Right now, the line between top-level allowance horses and graded stakes horses is sometimes so blurry, I am not even sure it is there at all. It doesn't always require shady behavior for a so-called "allowance horse" to win some of these big stakes races, given the low quality of the fields.
It isn't like this horse suddenly became Man O' War. He has yet to break 2:05 in either of these last two races. But when you are racing against the AP Arrows of the sport, it just doesn't take a whole lot to win.

This is exactly right. It's the same reason why I had no problem with them running Funny Cide in grade one and two races when most people were saying he needed to be dropped into lower company. These days, if I had a horse that I thought was an upper level allowance horse, I'd run exclusively in stakes because the stakes ranks are so thin and the few that are there are so inconsistent that sooner or later, your day will come. Or in the case of Student Council, your days. The same horses that SC just beat, Tiago came back to beat them too with a 106 figure, the type of figure that good 3yo's are able to run in the spring.