Any Given Saturday

[The Indomitable DrugS]

To give a very brief and tremendously simple summary. There were three route races at Tampa yesterday.

Race #1: The 5/2 favorite won by 1.5 lenghts in 1:45.46 (he had run a 78 Beyer last time out)

Race #8: Autobahn Girl won by 3 lengths as the even money favorite in 1:38.39 for the About 1 mile distance. She ran an 85 Beyer and 89 Beyer in her last two starts.

Race #10: Any Given Saturday won by 2 3/4 lengths in 1:44.27.

Now, I'm not familar with projecting speed figures at Tampa Downs, so I just ignored race #8, because it was run at an oddball distance.

Races #1 and 10 were run at the same distance. Race 10 went exactly 12 points faster than Race #1. So, if you assume the winner of race #1 simply ran the exact same number he did last time out, as I did, that would mean Any Given Saturday would have run 12 points faster than his 78.

It's never easy to make these projections when you have only two route races to work with---but, perhaps Race #1's winner did improve 5 points. Any Given Saturday certainly went backwards off his last race---we've already discussed the many viable reasons why the 2nd place finisher to him could improve...and he certainly did.