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Originally Posted by ArlJim78
You can make light of my comments calling them absurd, however I feel if you would open your mind a bit you might get it. I think I am more aware that he is not a machine than you are since you keep referring to whether he fired or not. He is a horse not a spark plug so I find this a very unsatisfying response. Instead of just trying to explain away his losses as misfires I have taken the time to look closer and have found factors that I feel are entirely consistent.
I will agree that overall LITF has run very consistently and no that doesn't make him the greatest horse of all time. It just means that he has been well taken care of and spotted well. Many times sprinters when they are off their game run way out, like 15 lenghts or more. LITF has not had races like that and overall he's been pretty consisent. His worst efforts are when he has to face one or more horses that can run a very fast pace to the quarter. I saw in another post of yours you stated that LITF has as much early speed as any horse in the country. Therein lies your mistake because that is far from true. If and when he tries to match the fastest horses for early speed he will not finish well.
How is it that he fires in every race that fits the pace description and competition level that I previously gave and he mis-fires every time he is in against tough horses? You say he is sore and has physical problems. I don't know if that's true and I don't think you know that for a fact either. I would just point out that if he had many physical problems on Saturday I think he would have finished much worse than he did. I really can't assess that race in full until I see the pace numbers. It's very possible that it was a sub par effort for him and maybe a physical issue contributed to it or it could be just what happens when a horse is over matched, they do not have a peak performance because everything doesn't set up in an optimal way for them. My main point is that even in peak condition he does not win that race. This isn't the first time that a horse dominates his age group but then shows to be much more up against it versus open company. He's not an off the pace type and yet he can't wire a top field like he faced Saturday.
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You statement that "he fires in every race that fits the pace description and competition level that I previously gave and he mis-fires every time he is in against tough horses" is totally untrue. He's gone :43 1/5 and won by 10 lengths. The only race he lost last year was the BC Sprint. That was one race. That is hardly proof of anything. A more obvious reason for his poor performance was because he had one too many trips across the country and one too many hard races. It's not as if the BC Sprint was a great field. There were no horses in there like Speighstown or Lit De Justice. The BC sprint was won by a 3 year old named Silver Train who had been consistently losing to bad 3 year olds all year. If you thought that LITF was overmatched in the BC Sprint then I'm sure you thought that Silver Train had no chance in the world. If you didn't think the best 3 year old sprinter could win, then you obviously didn't think a mediocre 3 year old sprinter like ST could win. So you obviously misjudged the competition in the race. It wasn't that tough of a race. In fact, another 3 year old ran 4th in the race. Attila's Storm ran 4th in the BC Sprint. So you had 3 year olds finishing in two of the top four positions. That blows your argument out of the water rigth there. You were saying that LITF was not good enough to win because he was only beating 3 year olds and the BC Sprint would be mouch tougher. You were clearly wrong. A couple of 3 year olds ran 1st and 4th. LITF was clearly the best 3 year old sprinter last year, so he was obviosly good enough to compete in that race. Your contention that the pace was too fast for him was nonsense because he had gone much faster than that and still won.
And yes, I do know for a fact that the horse is hurting right now. First of all, trainers don't lie and say their horse is hurt when they're not. They often times do the opposite and say that a sore horse is fine. They don't say that a sound horse is hurt. I've been in the business for over 20 years and I can't think of any trainer saying that a sound horse was hurt. In addition to Gilchrist admitting the horse has physical problmes this year that he didn't have last year, I saw the horse gallop myself. I saw him gallop last month and he galloped sore.
With regard to whether LITF runs the same every time, he definitely does not. Some of his wins last year were much more impressive than other wins. In some of his wins, I would estimate that he ran 3-4 lengths better than in some of his less impressive wins. I'd have to pull out the videos to refresh my memory, but I remember him finishing very strong in some of those wins and not as strong in some of the other wins.
One thing that you are obviously not good at is judging a horse based on a win against a weak field. There are horses that break their maidens every day by 5 lengths. How do you know if the horse is a good horse or not? He didn't beat anyone if he simply won a maiden race. If you knew what you were looking at, you would have a very good idea of a horse's ability based on a maiden win. You need to be able to look at a horse's stride and judge a horse based on that. That is what I do for a living. That is how I can make a $500,000 offer based on a maiden win. That is why I am good at picking out 2 year olds at the sales based on 1/8 of a mile works. Going to back to the subject of buying horses who just broke their maiden, we actually offered them $800,000 for Wild Fit based on her maiden win. She didn't win by that big a margin and she didn't run that fast, but I was right about her. A few months later she ended up running 2nd in the Breeder's Cup and was sold for $3 million.