A question for the handicappers

[The Indomitable DrugS]

Originally Posted by my miss storm cat

Anyway I was curious about some of you... how often, if ever, you're around / have been around horses.

My parents both trained - and I've hotwalked them before and was around them a lot when I was younger.

I don't think it's any handicapping advantage to have worked around them or ridden them before ... other than with pre-race body language stuff.

Still, you have to know the horse you are looking at well to have any edge with the body langauge stuff.

Some horses look bad or do stuff like wash out bad before almost every race .. so them doing so on race day wouldn't be a disadvantage because the form has been established with them showing similarly discouraging signs in the pre-race.

Some horses will almost always look the part in the pre-race - have a quiet confident controlled energy to them and look well - what good is that if they've established their form that way?

Perhaps the ravest reviews any horse has ever got on TV in the pre-race this year came from Frank Lyons before the Blue Grass. "The way Pyro looks now - every horse in this race should be 99/1" was how it started - and it was followed with even more extreme hyperbole - comparing him with Muhammed Ali and everything else. He ran 10th at even money.