Summer Bird could be HOY

[Cannon Shell]

Originally Posted by brianwspencer

While I'm always torn on how I feel about Jackson, and am mostly playing devil's advocate on this particular issue -- why on Earth should he care about the "unknown" and it being "exciting?"

It's his horse, he doesn't think it's in her best interests to run on the stuff, just like he didn't with Curlin last year, and that turned out poorly.

Let's lobby Interpretation's folks to cut him back to a 5-furlong Poly allowance race this fall, it's unknown and would be exciting, right? The sport would be better for it.

No one said he should care though a "sportsman" may have.

The point of horseracing especially for the ultra-rich is to see who's horse is best and to test your horses limits. Since handicap racing has been all but eliminated in this country, it would be nice to see owners/trainers try to test thier horses by doing different things. Surely Jackson has done that with RA but lets face it, he needs to race her at 1 1/4 next year or there will always be that knock against her. Speculating that she could get the distance and doing it are two different things. I think Freddy is nuts to think that she is in another league from Summer Bird, especially at 1 1/4 which is clearly a distance that he excells at. People get too hung up on the results of one race especially in a race where SB was clearly at a disadvantage (track plays to RA's favor not to mention he was cutting back off a 1 1/2 race to 1 1/8th which is tricky).

Anyone who says the sport wouldnt be better off with RA running in the BC has a strange outlook on better off.