Cigar's maiden win...

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Originally Posted by The Indomitable DrugS

Stupidity?

Mott ran him four times on the turf after Hassinger, he ran Beyers of 77, 86, 76, and 79 in those four turf races.

Mike Smith rode him three week after his final turf start - he set a 44 3/5th pace and won by 8 - Bailey got on him the following month and he won the NYRA Mile by 7 lengths at 9/1 odds with a 115 Beyer.

Cigar actually won 17 dirt races in a row. The first win and the 2nd win of those 17 straight coming more than 18 months apart.

In Bailey's book, he mentioned how he always thought Cigar had talent but couldn't figure out why that didn't translate that into wins.

One night he had to leave for the Meadowlands to ride a horse that night missing Cigar's win on dirt, when he came in the next day he asked Mike any good one's you ride after I left? Smith said yeah Cigar won...that's as close to paraphrasing that paragraph as my memory will allow...

Obcourse Bailey got on him right after that when Smith decided to ride Devil is Due in the now Cigar Mile. The rest as they say is history.

[The Indomitable DrugS]

It's a little interesting that they added lasix for the first time when he made his turf debut just two weeks after that big dirt win.

Perhaps he even bled a tiny bit in the dirt win.

That dirt MSW win was just a HUGE performance though! In a 6f sprint, he gets left, is rushed up into a speed duel through sharp middle fractions, fractures his sharp breaking pace rival into total defeat, and stays on to win with a big figure while a next out winner who sucked up for 2nd couldn't close the final margin to any less than 2.25 lengths.

That was just his 2nd lifetime start, and it was off of a 2.5 month layoff. And it's not like he had to be a sprinter - his sire's sire won the Epsom Derby at 12f's and his dam sire swept the American Triple Crown series.

Performances like that are very rare among lightly raced horses.