Quote:
Originally Posted by Calzone Lord
Romans won the award for best put-over in 2011 with Sassy Image.
Sassy Image should have been about 500/1 odds on the Kentucky Derby day undercard in the Humana Distaff. She opened at like 9/1 and went off 16/1 on the biggest betting day of the year.
She had some corrective throat surgery during the layoff before the Humana Distaff...and was being bet heavily into the wildly superior Hilda's Passion.
Whoever the vet was who did her surgery should have got an eclipse.
Romans winning the Breeders Cup Mile with Court Vision over Goldikova and Gio Ponti at Churchill later in the year was like a perfectly logical outcome compared to that pig Sassy Image being transformed into the top female sprinter in the land overnight.
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I think you're dressing it up a little too much as a miracle. Isn't Sassy Image like 5 for 6 at Churchill Downs? She was a multiple graded stakes winner at 2. She is a multiple stakes winning router, which often is an advantage on the cutback to 7f. If one could justify drawing a line through the Sabin (not sure if the breathing issue was reported before the race), then she certainly wasn't impossible. Having missed the vast majority of her 3yo season you would have had to also ignore her Beyer numbers. The allowance comeback would have supported the assumption that she progressed from 2 to 3 (to 4) the same way a normal stakes-caliber horse would.
You would have had to have faith to bet her, but you certainly didn't need divine intervention.