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Originally Posted by King Glorious
Your are sort of making the point for me. The Penn and WV Derbies are options that weren't there before. At least not real options for top horses. Add in the Indiana Derby and some other races.......there are just more options nowdays for top horses to avoid each other. That's not the fault of the BC that they avoid each other so much that the BC is one of the rare chances to get them all together and thus, a lot of emphasis is placed on the BC results when it comes to time for voting for championships.
Getting back to the Derby, I think that you are avoiding the question. The question is since so much has changed in the way people prepare for the Derby, why aren't people blaming the Derby? The answer is because the Derby hasn't changed. It's been the first Saturday in May for the longest and the only thing that's changed is the way people prepare for it. Same with the BC.
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Well what I was getting at in an earlier post, and perhaps this doesn't make sense as far as those specific 3yo races you mentioned go, was that all these "new" trumped up races are created with the BC in mind so that horses can get to the BC by following a path of least resistance.
And as far as the Derby goes, I didn't avoid the question. People do blame the Derby. The Derby trail (not necessarily the actual race--Eight Belles was the first horse to break down in it in a while) trashes horses. That's why the training/campaigning has been altered, but not the race itself. Its been around for well over a hundred years, not twenty.
The BC is not in the same boat. The Derby is just one part of the season (and traditionally the pinnacle), with many other prestigious races (from every division) taking the spotlight at various times throughout the year. The BC tries to drown all that out (once again, indirectly) and compress the entire season into a single day of racing, to the detriment of all those other historic races which ultimately become moot in the grand scheme of things.