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Originally Posted by oracle80
Speaking of Polytrack, it looks as if you can throw form for the most part right out the window judging by some of the weird winners over the weekend, most of whom had either run or trained over the track, and the number of good horses who didn't run their usual race over it, such as Happy Ticket and Spun Sugar in the Juddmonte Spinster (gr. I), and a host of others in the Phoenix Breeders' Cup (gr. II) and Alcibiades (gr. I).
That quote courtesy of the bloodhorse.com from Steve Haskin's article which just appeared on the site within the past hour.
I guess I have pretty good company in my thoughts.
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Spun Sugar throws in clunkers all over the place so that isn't surprising. Happy Ticket was totally cut off in the stretch which cost her second which would have made sense since she was the second best horse in the race behind Asi Siempre who won. The Phoenix BC and Alcibiades were two of the more wide open races on paper that I've seen so nothing would have surprised me in either of them. Does it put turf horses on equal footing with dirt horses? Yup, absolutely. Can you throw it out when capping their next races off of poly? Absolutely not. Obviously it would be idiocy to bet turf horses that do well on it if they move to the dirt afterwards but to ignore the form of the dirt horses that run there when they return to the dirt would be a mistake, in my opinion, 90% of the time. You are always going to have a few horses that may not take to the track but you have that with horses going from one dirt track to another as it is.