I've heard the man speak and the dude is frickin clueless.
I left socal five years ago and don't follow the circuit like I used to, but what I remember is that he clearly got very nice stock from his owners and constantly underachieved with them.
He kind of reminds me of Gary Jones (except that Jones had no concerns about a horse's welfare). Year in and year out they would get well bred and talented horses that always seemed to underachieve.
He also sort of fits the mold used to cast Alex Hassinger, Simon Bray and that former Lukas assistant that trained Artax. Granted, he's not as bad as they all were but he definitely underachieves with what he's received.
Do I even need to bring up the Declan's Moon aiming for the Malibu thing?
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Originally Posted by Rupert Pupkin
Why would you say that? He consistently has one of the highest win percentages of any trainer. Win percentage is certainly not the only metric to use when evaluating a trainer's ability, but I don't think there are too many incompetent trainers out there with really high win percentages.
Ellis' win percentages is slightly lower than normal this year, but that's only because he has an unusually high number of 2nd place finishes this year. He is at 17% this year. He has 15 wins from 90 starts but he has run second about 23 or 24 times. His win percentage was 29% in 2006 and it was 19% in 2007. He can't be too incompetent with numbers like that.
In addition, look at the way he moves horses up off the claim. He does it very consistently. The one I can think of most recently is the one that ran on Saturday. The horse's name is Quick Enough. He claimed that horse off Carla Gaines for $25,000 back in December. He got the horse to win a starter allowance race, then a $54,000 nwx1 state bred allowance race, and then a $52,000 nwx1 open allowance race. They paid $25,000 for the horse 6 months ago. He's already made $90,000 and his value has gone up by 3x. Those owners have made about 6x their money.
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