Lava Man - Prep at Keeneland
 

This is huge for this horse, if they shipped in before the race I would be tossing him, but now, a must use, will have a full month to get acclimated. O'Neil, a very smart man...

http://bc.bloodhorse.com/viewstory.asp?id=35723

I should be at Keeneland friday. I'll try to take some pics of him.

lets see how he will do no a real racetrack, with some real horses

Great move, he still won't beat Bernardini but I like his chances for second a lot more.

Oneil gave a lot of the credit for Lava Mans sharpness,because of the training on the Hollywood track. Looks like he wants to keep him on the polly for training.

Has he been running on fake racetracks against fake horses?

I think it's a bad move. What is training at Keeneland going to do to help him for Churchill? They are two entirely different tracks. Might as well have stayed home and kept him at Hollywood. At least he already knows he likes that Hollywood junk. This is worthless in my opinion. I hate all this talk about letting horses get acclimated to a surface. Either they will like it or they won't. If u don't like broccoli, is your mother making u eat more of it going to make u like it? No. If a horse doesn't like a certain track (say it's too hard and stings his feet or something), he's going to run worse on it the more he trains on it because he will have had time to develop a memory of how it hurts. And this is even worse because he's not training on the track he's running on. Now watch the weather cause O'Neill to lose some days of training. Just watch. While it's beautiful here in Southern Cal.

well he knows more about the horse than all of us combined......... he prob. dosent ship that well so the extra time between shipping and the race will do him good.

Exactly, he has about 3 weeks to get acclimated to a new surrounding, I am sure they will take him over the Churchill surface too, it is only about a 45 minutes ride I have heard

I think it can only be regarded as a positive move. None of his previous 3 trips resulted in success, so now its his last chance to prove the naysayers wrong. First thing to do is change what didnt work before. I dont care if hes running on broken glass the next 4 weeks, it beats shipping in 2-3 days before the race as was the case with his ill fated trips to Florida, NY and Japan, all which resulted in his 3 worst races of his life.

Lava Man is going to be a serious threat on BC Day.

I was looking at Lava Man's Sheets last night and it looks like he's been off form every time before he shipped...It's not like he was peaked out and then just failed...Also, I saw O'neil's comments about he's not as fast, but Lava Man has run negative 3's before and I don't believe Bernardini has hit that yet...I don't know what his Sheet # for the Goodwood is, but it's probably at least a zero and he should go forward, not tail off...

I dont think training over Keeneland will help him one bit at CHD. Its nice to ship in early, I agree with that 100%. Shipping in a week early, something like that and just galloping/jogging over the surface after a final work is a good idea. Shipping into Keeneland to prep a horse to run at CHD, makes no sense

Big difference flying over to Japan off a huge race to run in another huge race. That was just a dumb spot for Lava Man. No horse would take that ship well

Also, I saw a comment where O'Neil said that LM had bad feet and they wanted to train on the Poly because of it...

I agree, he should have never run in Japan. None of our horses ever seem to do well there. I hope the connections of Kennle Up pass up the temptation of sending him over this year to run in teh Japan Cup. Too many horses.

He knew more about the horse than all of us last year too. Look where that got him when he shipped. He's still learning what will work and what won't. He doesn't know if this will be a good move for Lava Man any more than we do because he's never tried it.

About an hour and a half.

Also, he didn't run well in his last race in Cali before shipping, this is the first time he's been running well before he's shipped...

Yeah he mentioned this during the telecast, he was wanting to give Lava 3 weeks in Kentucky.

I am very excited about this. I like this horse a lot. I like Dini as well, but the gambler in me is going with Lava for 2 reasons.

1 - I love the underdogs
2 - I love the odds Lava will get compared to Dini

If you drive like Wayne Lukas.:p