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#11
10-18-2010, 12:00 PM
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Quote:
When everyone and their brother realizes you are the horse to beat, they ride the race to beat you. If you are a high level speed horse, they throw a rabbit at you. If you run like Zenyatta, they back down the pace as much as they can and force you to make your first move on the turn at the exact point the pace is picking up sharply. That in turn forces you to out finish the fresh horses in front of you after already exerting yourself hard just to get into contention. No horse with her style that ever lived could have won by a large margin or ran a very fast race given some of the conditions she's faced this year and last year. Just look at some of the closing times! In fact, there are examples from last year of pretty good mares that were left in her wake given similar conditions. The thing is, even if you know she's much better than the horses she's barely beating and capable of running a faster final time given a more "dirt like" pace, that still doesn't tell you how fast she's capable of running with more average conditions, whether she's as good on dirt as on synthetic, or whether she's even as good in 2010 as she was in 2008 and in the Classic in 2009. If I had to venture a guess, I doubt her connections are sure either. They know what we know. 1. They've seen how fast her peak efforts were when she had a decent "synthetic level pace" in front of her. 2. They've seen how fast she ran in the 2008 Apple Blossom on dirt in only her 4th career start before she peaked on synthetic. 3. They've seen how she handles Hollywood's "DIRT" training track in regular morning gallops and know how she handled Churchill Downs when she was shipped there to run (but subsequently scratched when the track came up wet). 4. They know how she's doing physically now. But the honest truth is that no one knows where she is now or how good she was at her peak because of the nature of synthetic racing and the conditions of most of her races. That's why people point to the streak. Until you are exposed to rough conditions and get beat a few times (like Blind Luck), you don't know where the bottom is. And running reasonably fast when conditions warrant and managing to win even when conditions are terrible signals there's a pretty deep bottom. She may be a major contender to win the Classic despite running slowly this year and barely beating some very mediocre rivals that would be 100-1 in the Classic. She might finish well beaten because she's not as good this year as she was last year and in 2008 or doesn't like the dirt as much. She might get beat but run a very good race. You look at the odds and make your bet based on the tools you use to evaluate things like that. All her connections have been trying to do is give her the best chance they can of her firing her "A" race on that day. They avoided many of the possible challenges along the way because they didn't want to go to CD with a tired horse or to lose her for the year to an accumulation of small injuries as a tough season developed. Right or wrong, that was the plan and it seems to at least have gotten her there in one piece and fresh. They more or less did what they did last year. It failed to get her HOTY in 2009 because there was a once in 100 year great campaign by another horse. They gambled that wouldn't happen again and they would get HOTY if they could repeat in the Classic. Last edited by classhandicapper : 10-18-2010 at 12:40 PM. 
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