Quote:
Originally Posted by RockHardTen1985
Its true though, I hate synthetics but its part of the game we love and bet on.
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American horse racing has always been about dirt racing. Our dirt racing has always been light years better than any place on earth ... and a lot of true foreign superstars have been smoked when they've stepped to our good dirt horses. Look at our record when our horses ship halfway around the world for the dirt races on the Dubai World Cup card.
We've absolutely owned races like the Dubai World Cup on dirt and the Golden Shaheen on dirt .. yet everytime one of our top turf horses go to Dubai they almost always get totally embarrassed and wildly outclassed. Hell, our turf horses get their ass kicked on a consistant basis in the turf races on the Breeders Cup card .. and we have advantages in numbers and course familiarity going into those races.
Turf racing is a lot like soccer. The turf horses in Japan are certainly better than they are here. The turf horses in Europe are so much better than the turf horses here that it's a complete joke. Because synthetic plays so much like turf racing ... it stands to reason that the good foreign horses should eat our good horses lunch over the crap. They sent only 3 horses for the first BC Classic on rubber .. and ran 1st and 2nd. Curlin couldn't beat Shirreffs Tiago on it. They sent over just 2 for last years Classic and one of them was dealing with real soundness issues. The only sound one in the race finished 3rd despite running a very akward and erratic race and getting the best number on both Ragozin and Thoro-Graph in defeat. No show Sea The Stars was considered wildly superior to Twice Over.
If we cared about soccer - and all of our best athletes pointed to careers in soccer instead of the NFL, NBA, or MLB .. of course we'd dominate the world in that pathetically simplistic stupid joke of a sport.
You have generations of selective breeding in horse racing - and the emphasis has been on speed suited for dirt racing for long enough that it's not as simple as assuming that we can dominate the world at their own brand of game just by merely pointing our good horses to it and just trying it instead of ignoring it with our best.
Zenyatta has a whole lot more to prove as a dirt horse. Her two wins - both in the Apple Blossom came with slow figures against very mediocre competition. You can spin all you want and say Ginger Punch was in one of those fields .. but she was coming in off of a layoff, had missed time training and was rumored to not be doing well in Feb, and she was put away by the hapless Brownie Points before Zenyatta even got going with her big late move.