[Danzig]

Originally Posted by Bobby Fischer

On this whole conspiracy thing - sheesh guys. It's not as bad as Pace Advantage over here, but not everything is a conspiracy! Some of these things happen at face value.


The horse got roughed up bad in the Derby.
When he came out, the primary concern was getting the hoof to attach back. They probably did the general "testing" for heat on his legs and it probably came back ok. His hoof healed quickly and they were probably excited and satisfied. They breezed him and he responded very well. Thats about it.

After the Preakness they went over with a "fine tooth comb" looking for problems/excuses which brings us up to date.


As far as being an excuse for his poor efforts - I think the Derby was a bad enough trip that he needs no excuse for that race. Ideally he would have recovered and started picking up horses late to get up for 5th or 6th, but there was really no shame in being eased home at that point. Anyone who tossed Friesan Fire "because of" the Derby should consider the proverbial "giving up the game".


In the Preakness he had another pretty bad trip. He broke to his knees. Instead of settling 5 lengths off the pace where the setup for him was more reasonable, Saez called on him for run early rushing up. At the same time Big Drama broke Friesan Fire's momentum and bore out on him. He had to fight through Big Drama early, while chasing a pace which annihilated the other chasers. However in the Preakness you would have liked to have seen him show some resistance, which he didn't.

Horses come back and run big races all the time after getting two bad trips in a row, some at good prices. The hardest part about keeping faith in that kind of situation is that with Friesan Fire, his nightmare trips coincided with his first true class test, and he didn't show any extraordinary signs of resistance.

i seriously doubt that his grabbed quarter was bad at all-he lost no training time, so it couldn't have been serious. if it was serious, then they had no business running him back. i think that injury was overblown and had no bearing on his derby loss.
the horse ran 1 1/16th in his last derby start. how they thought that as a final prep, and seven weeks to the derby was the way to get that colt prepared to run 10f i don't know-imo that's a far bigger reason for his lackluster performance than any supposed quarter injury.