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#1
08-07-2006, 12:12 PM
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Nothing at all....just a gut feeling after watching the way he has been campaigned this year and seeing how poorly he travelled and performed Saturday...this is not a rumor going around and I don't want to start a rumor...this is just my opinion on the horse....he has some issues and they are obviously affecting his performance now...
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#2
08-07-2006, 12:22 PM
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Flower Alley looked awful during Derby week. But he did look good in the Salvatore Mile. Pletcher has this schedule mapped out ever since Dec of 2005. I doubt he had an injury then. I think the horse just ran a clunker and Pletcher didnt have him ready.
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#3
08-07-2006, 12:24 PM
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i enjoy reading this site but please do not speculate like this without information. it is not fair to the trainer because the betting public will get all over him for running a horse that was not sound. TP would never do that.
TP would have like to get a 2nd prep in and he was not able to. I would not count this horse out yet. He ran ok for 8F but was not totally fit for the race.
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#4
08-07-2006, 12:30 PM
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I believe it was made quite clear that it was just his opinion. If the "betting public" wants to make their own decision about where to put their money from someone else's opinions, then so be it. But I dont think there's anything wrong with what was said. I do agree, though, that TP wouldnt run him if he knew he was unsound...
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#5
08-07-2006, 12:32 PM
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How come Pletcher couldnt get that 2nd prep in him before the Whitney if he had this whole campaign planned out for the past 9 months?
Do you guys think there were physical problems that forced him to be out for those 8 months, before he beat Guns n Roses at Monmouth?
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#6
08-07-2006, 12:33 PM
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I don't think it's such a bad thing to say that perhaps Flower Alley just needed the race. I suspect that is the case, not injury. Besides, it wasn't like he was facing a bunch of chumps at 'Toga on Saturday. There's no shame in losing in your second start back in darn near a year to horses like Invasor and West Virginia.
__________________
The world's foremost expert on virtually everything on the Redskins 2010 season: "Im going to go out on a limb here. I say they make the playoffs."
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#7
08-07-2006, 12:34 PM
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Quote:
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#8
08-07-2006, 12:39 PM
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Quote:
__________________
The world's foremost expert on virtually everything on the Redskins 2010 season: "Im going to go out on a limb here. I say they make the playoffs."
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#9
08-07-2006, 12:35 PM
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The Flower Alley we saw last year would not have lost to West Virginia and would have at least given Invasor a tussle.
Hard to believe in that many months he couldnt have come up with a 2nd prep so he would have been at his best for one of the most important races of the year.
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#10
08-08-2006, 12:57 AM
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Quote:
I still would not totally count the horse out though. Pletcher has good vets and they can often get a couple more good races out of horses even if the horse has a fairly significant problem. They obviously need to be careful with this horse because he is a very valuable horse. It's a fine line how hard to push in a situation like this. On the one hand, you can push a little harder than normal if you know the horse is retiring after two more races, which is the case here. In other words, they don't have to worry about doing a little bit of permanent damage to him if he's retiring any way. They can't push too hard though. They don't want the horse to break down. Trainers will often times find themselves in this predicament with 3 year olds. They will have a 3 year old that has a bad ankle and the Ky Derby is a month away. They have two choices. They can turn the horse out to the farm and be confident that the horse will come back 100%, but if they do this they will miss the Derby. The other choice is to inject the horse's ankle and run him in the Derby, but there is the possibility that permanent damage will be done to the ankle. That means the horse may not be able to come back as a 4 year old. There are so many things that go on that the fans know nothing about. A trainer will never say publicly, "The horse ran bad last time because his ankle was bothering him. This time we injected the ankle with cortisone, and that's why he ran so much better today." You will never hear a trainer say that. They'll have some bogus excuse as to why the horse ran bad in the previous race. They'll say that he was short, or that he didn't like the track or something like that. Last edited by Rupert Pupkin : 08-08-2006 at 12:59 AM.
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#11
08-08-2006, 05:35 AM
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Quote:
Last edited by pdrift1 : 08-08-2006 at 05:37 AM.
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#12
08-08-2006, 06:10 AM
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very well said rupert...I agree on all points.
If FA was just a little short he should have been in the race all the way to the wire, maybe fading to finish 4th or something. He just wasn't the same horse as he was last year. I think Betsy said it best in another thread--that while horses around him have continued to evolve he might have finished developing last fall.
__________________
 Seek respect, not attention.
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#13
08-07-2006, 12:33 PM
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I don't believe its a knock on the trainer or that this is just a fitness issue.
What I am concerned about, and I believe others as well, is that it's something else physically that we just don't know about yet. He should not have given a performance like he did on Saturday if everything was OK, imo. I'll bet that Pletcher was expecting more out of him even if he felt that he was a race behind Invasor in terms of fitness.
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